Synthetic Phonics

• The name ‘synthetic phonics’ comes from the concept of ‘synthesizing’, means combining or blending, hence the children learn to blend or combine individual sounds into words.
• A part to whole approach to reading.
• Begins by teaching the alphabetic code- the sounds of the letters before expecting children to read books.
• Teaches blending and segmenting using alphabetic letter sounds and main digraphs.
• Teaches Phonemic awareness so that all sounds in words can be identified:
  Cat is c-a-t; bus is b-u-s; stop is s-t-o-p
• Notice every letter in the word, left to right.
• Learn to segment words to spell them.
• Some common spelling rules are taught.
• Reading and spelling are taught simultaneously.
• Very systematic
• Blending used as the first strategy for reading unknown words.
• No guessing from the pictures, initial letter, context or word shapes.
• The letter names are not taught initially.
• Very fast as one letter sound per day is done.
• Teaches tricky words- learning about tricky parts of words.
• Use decodable text initially. Other books given only when there is fluency and an ability to work out unknown words.

Analytic Phonics

• A whole to part approach to reading.
• Begins with whole word sight vocabulary and reading books.
• Uses picture, initial letter and contextual cues for whole word recognition.
• Uses text that is repetitive…. picture gives clue for the new word introduced on the page.
• Alphabet letter sounds are introduced to enable the initial letter cue for word recognition.
• Digraphs are rarely taught.
• Key sight words are memorised visually.
• Blending used as the last strategy instead of the first.
• Word patterns covered at a later stage.