What are Synthetic phonics reading schemes?
Some of the reading schemes offered by Reading Chest are synthetic phonics reading
schemes and some are not. There are differences between them, but you might not
even notice. Basically children learn to read phonics books by blending together
sounds which are made up of single letters or groups of letters. You might now be
thinking – What’s new? – Are children not trying to sound out words in all reading
books? Yes – but in other reading schemes they are encouraged to use other clues
to predict the text as well such as following a repetitive pattern, looking at the
pictures or thinking about what word would just make sense.
‘Letters and Sounds’
You might have heard of ‘Letters and Sounds.’ It is the scheme created
by the Government’s National Literacy Strategy in 2007. It encourages English schools
to teach children to read using a synthetic phonics programme. ‘Letters and Sounds’
is based on evidence which shows that children learn to read quicker if they are
taught letter sounds first and blend them together to form words.
Phonemes (sounds)
In short synthetic phonics teaches children the 44 phonemes (sounds) in the English
language, linking letters or groups of letters with sounds.
It is important that when you help your child to sound out words, you focus on
the phoneme rather than the individual letters which might only be part of a phoneme
(sound). For example, when reading the word, boat – it has 3 phonemes (sounds) –
b – oa – t. It would not make any sense at all to split up the ‘oa’ sound in the
middle to be ‘o’ and ‘a’. Children can then use these letters and their corresponding
sounds to read and spell words.
As your child progresses they learn that one phoneme (sound) can be represented
by different letters, such as the sound in the middle of rain,
which is represented as ‘ai’ can also be represented as ‘ay’ (play)
and ‘a-e’ (tale).
Synthetic phonics Books
Each book in a synthetic phonics reading scheme contains words that the children
can read using their knowledge of sounds (phonemes) and letters so that they should
make steady progress. So, once children have learned the letter or group of letters
that make the sounds in words, they should be able to read all of the words without
making guesses or predictions based on other clues in the story such as the pictures
or the pattern.
You might not notice the difference between synthetic phonics books and other
reading books. All reading books use a phonics element, but books which are not
in synthetic phonics schemes may also include some other ‘tricky words’ which cannot
easily be sounded out. Children are taught to make sensible ‘guesses’ based on other
clues such as the pattern of the story or the pictures.
Please note that some synthetic phonics schemes offered by Reading Chest have
not been put into book bands by their publishers. For the simplicity of book selection,
Reading Chest has therefore given some books a ‘best fit’ book band.
Opinions about the best way to teach children to read are constantly changing.
Individual children learn to read in different ways.
What on earth?
Some of the language used to describe what happens in synthetic phonic teaching is really tricky.
Amazingly your child may well know and understand these terms…
- Blend (blending) this is when your child draws individual sounds together to pronounce a word, e.g. h-e-l-p, blended together, reads help
- Phoneme: the smallest single identifiable sound, e.g. the letters ‘sh’ represent just one sound, but ‘fl’ represents two (/f/ and /l/), There are 44 phonemes in the English language. Click here to hear how they sound.
- Grapheme: a letter or a group of letters representing one sound, e.g. sh, th, igh, ious.
- Digraph: is when two letters make one sound, e.g. sh, ch, th, ph.
- Vowel digraphs are two vowels which, together, make one sound, e.g. ie, oo, ai, ee
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