What is Synthetic Phonics?

Synthetic phonics is where phonemes (sounds) associated with particular graphemes (letters) are pronounced in isolation and blended together (synthesised). For example, children are taught to take a single-syllable word such as cat apart into its three letters, pronounce a phoneme for each letter in turn c-a-t, and blend the phonemes together to form a word. For writing, we would ask the child to ‘segment’ the word cat into its phonemes (sounds): c-a-t and then match with the correct grapheme (letter for each sound).