It’s important that children learn the association between letters and sounds in a direct and systematic way. The 5 essential elements of reading instruction are:
These are the five building blocks that children need to become fluent readers.
For young children to read successfully, they need to understand the alphabetic code. This is where individual letters and groups of letters represent the sounds of spoken language. There are 26 letters of the alphabet but there are actually 44 sounds, or phonemes, in the English language. It’s important that children learn to make the association between these letters and sounds in a direct and systematic way.
Synthetic phonics is a method of instruction in which words are broken up into the smallest units of sound (phonemes). It teaches children to first make connections between the letters of written texts (graphemes) and the sounds of spoken language. It simultaneously teaches children how to identify all the phonemes in a word and match them to a letter in order to read or spell correctly.
Research, such as the Clackmannanshire Report (Johnson and Watson, 2005) concluded that synthetic phonics instruction has a major and long‑lasting effect on children’s reading and spelling attainment. Similarly, the Independent review of the teaching of early reading (Rose Report, 2006) stated that synthetic phonics is the best way to teach most children to become skilled readers and writers.
“Having considered a wide range of evidence, the review has concluded that the case for systematic phonic work is overwhelming and much strengthened by a synthetic approach.”Rose Report (2006)
Fast Phonics uses the power of synthetic phonics to boost reading skills. The program is a phonics ‘first and fast’ approach that uses high‑quality systematic, synthetic phonics instruction as the principle approach to decoding print.
The program ensures that children progress from simple to more complex phonics knowledge and skills and that they cover the major grapheme/phoneme correspondences. It recognises that children learn in different ways and uses a multisensory approach to engage students with visual, auditory and kinaesthetic activities.
