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This is something I have been learning a lot about in a practical way for the past year or so as it is the approved format for teaching children to read and write here in the UK. My understanding is that schools are given a special governmental grant to help
their literacy programmes if they use this method.
Basically what it does is takes the pure letter sounds and blends them to make the words. As children develop their skills they advance onto pronouncing
phonemes, sounds where two letter come together to make one small indetifiable sound such as 'sh' or 'ch' and so on. After this is mastered they move on to what are known as
graphemes, a group of letters such as 'igh' and 'ough' (as in 'though'). Finally there are
digraphs which are two letters making one sound, 'th', 'ph', 'sh', or vowel digraphs where two vowels come together to make one sound e.g. 'ai', 'oo', 'ow'. These can be done in any order (I think) - it is not strict, I have taken this order from the Wikipedia link shared below, however in the leaflet I have here it is presented as phoneme, digraph and grapheme.
In a classroom setting synthetic phonics will involve the pairing up of letter(s) - sounds in an automatic, rapid and systematic way. (Wikipedia, see link below). Throughout the learning process there is an emphasis on all-through-the-word blending for both reading and spelling.
Within English we all know that there are words that do not conform to any rules. These are known as
'tricky words' and are some of the most common words we use; 'said' and 'was' are two such examples. These irregular parts just have to be remembered, and from what I have seen at our local school the kids love these words, because the teachers infuse fun and silliness when teaching these words.
While teaching these phonics the teachers will concentrate more on accuracy than fluency as with time and practice fluency will occur naturally.
Synthetic Phonics is not a method to teach whole words as shapes and does not teach alphabet letter names until the letter sounds have been mastered. This way of teaching does not involve guessing at words from shape, pictures and context, but rather the children rehearse what they have been taught to date in their reading level and this embeds their learning so they can soon access 'real' books because of the effectiveness of the synthetic phonics approach to teaching.
This article was written mostly from experience and what I remembered, but I have inserted information from the Wikepedia link shared below and the "Jolly Phonics; Parent/Teacher Guide" leaflet provided by the school to all parents last year when our children were first starting on this program.
I hope that it has been useful and parents when you are faced with assisting your child at home while they are learning this in school, I hope that this article helps bring you understanding of the process and in some small part enables you to support what the teachers are doing so you can watch your child move from strength to strength in reading.
Peace
EF.x
(October 2008) (
