Synthetic Approach

The synthetic phonics approach is a part to whole approach that teaches students to work from single phoneme/grapheme correspondence to blending sounds into a word.  With this approach students are first taught the sound that is represented by a single letter or group of letters.

When a number of letters and their corresponding sounds have been taught, the teacher then demonstrates how to blend the sound together to "read" the word represented. This “sound it out” approach is a good way to teach children to use their phonemic awareness to decode words.