What is meant by the term synthetic in synthetic phonics?
This has nothing to do with being artificial, or being made of plastic! It is to do with putting things together. You synthesise when you blend together the component sounds of a word to produce the sound of the word as a whole. Thus putting the sounds /k/, /a/ and /t/ together produces the sound of the word ‘cat’. It is a Eureka moment for a child, when they find they can do this by themselves for a new word – to find out what it means by how it sounds. It opens the whole world of books to them.
