What is Structured Synthetic Phonics?
Synthetic Phonics is a way of teaching children to read. It has been identified both here and overseas as the most successful approach to the teaching of reading and spelling.
The ‘synthetic’ component reflects the practice of ‘synthesising’, or blending together. The ‘phonic’ part reflects the process of linking individual speech sounds (phonemes) to written symbols (graphemes).
Essentially, when a child learns to read using Synthetic Phonics they learn to link letters to speech sounds and then blend these sounds together to read words. They also learn to separate (segment) words into their constituent sounds and link these sounds to letters in order to spell them.
Whole language approach v SSP
The whole language approach to reading uses a top down perspective, as opposed to the bottom up approach of phonics instruction. Learners practice memorizing sight words, an increasingly complex set of high frequency words essential to making meaning in the language.
Mandated SSP in Victorian Schools
From Term 1 2025, all Victorian government students from Prep to Grade 2 will be taught using a systematic synthetic phonics approach as part of their reading programs, with a minimum of 25 minutes daily explicit teaching of phonics and phonemic awareness.
Introducing Little Learners Love Literacy
Little Learners Love Literacy is an explicit and sequential literacy approach for teaching children to read, write and spell with confidence.
Evidence-based literacy research stresses the importance of explicit and sequential literacy teaching from the beginning.
Little Learners Love Literacy is a systematic and engaging program with focused explicit lessons, games, crafts, music, puppets, drawing and much more.
Little Learners Love Literacy is designed to be used whole class in Foundation to Year 2 and forms the basis of our structured synthetic phonics approach to early literacy instruction.
The program focuses on:
Phonemic awareness and phonics for spelling and reading
Handwriting
Reading fluency
Vocabulary and comprehension.
The sequence also includes morphology.
Click here to download the Little Learners Love Literacy brochure
More information for parents and carers can be found at:
https://www.littlelearnersloveliteracy.com.au/blogs/assessment/parents-and-carers
Would you like to know more? Here are some videos: