What Is Synthetic Phonics? Easy Explanation!! Should You Teach Your Child to Read Using this System?

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If you have been looking into the topic of teaching your child to read or if you are an educator, you may have heard of the term synthetic phonics. In this video I am going to explain what synthetic phonics is, and I will also share with you some valuable resources that can help you get started with this methodology for teaching children to read

Free Resources mentioned on the video:

Synthetic Phonics Programs:
- Check out my review of my favourite Synthetic Phonics Program out there!

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Other free resources:

This system of teaching to read is used in some reading programs, and it is proven to be one of the most effective methods of teaching children to read. Unfortunately, it is not the way that reading instruction is normally taught at school.

Synthetic phonics, as I said, is a way to teaching and learning how to read.
The first key skill that children learning to read with this method have to develop is identifying the individual sounds that form words, being able to isolate those sounds, which is called “segmenting”, and also blend them together to actually form words.
For instance, the word cat is formed by the individual sounds /c/ /a/ /t/ - What I have just done is segment the word into its individual sounds. And when you blend them all together (or synthetize them) you get the word cat.
So, first of all, children learning to read using the synthetic phonics approach are trained on this type of skill.
While they are getting an awareness of the concept of sounds and how they blend together to form words and how you can also isolate them and play with them to form new words, they are introduced to letter names and sounds at the same time.
So, on a synthetic phonics program, they would learn that the letter A makes the /ah/ sound, and that the letter B makes the /bah/ sound and so on and so forth. This way when they are exposed to simple words such us cat or dog, they will be able to decode them without problems.
However, we must not forget that English has only 26 letters, but 44+ sounds. In order to make up for those extra sounds, we use letter combination sounds, such us the combination of the C and H letters which normally represent the /ch/ sound like if chat.
Once they have grasped the concept of individual sounds and children have learnt the most common sounds that individual letters make, children are introduced to letter combination sounds.

One of the most important things to remember is that the books that children are exposed to will be adequate for their level. Say they have been introduced to the most common individual sounds that single letters make, plus a few letter combination sounds. The texts and the books that children will be reading at that point will contain words that use that knowledge.
If we introduce too advanced books, it can be overwhelming. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that parents can’t read more difficult books to their children.
All in all, children will be exposed to these more advanced books gradually and in a systematic way.
It is not common to find a reading program that is 100% purely synthetic phonics-based.
Many times synthetic phonics programs will use a combination of methods, as there is an argument that English is full of irregularities and that some words just need to be memorized, full stop.
Whereas it is true that English has many irregularities, and that we find the same letters and the same letter combinations representing different sounds, it is also true that there are patterns and tricks that can help children decode these words without the need of using memory or guessing. This way the number of sight words is limited to a bare minimum.

To summarize the 2 key pillars of synthetic phonics is segmenting and blending sounds. When learning to read using synthetic phonics you always go from individual sounds to more complex sounds. Children are not encouraged to look at the word as a whole, guess by looking at pictures or just look at the first letter of words and guess. This is actually another reason why children learning to read with synthetic phonics tend to become better spellers.

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