Sounds Together
The complete systematic, synthetic phonics teaching programme
Programme Overview
The Sounds Together Programme provides you with full and detailed planning for each day's phonics teaching. This planning has been carefully designed to ensure that learning is progressive and cumulative and that previous learning is repeatedly revisited and reinforced.
A key feature of Sounds Together is that the planning is completely integrated with a full suite of on-screen resources for the Smart Board IWB. This minimises the amount of time that it takes to prepare for each phonics session, because all the IWB resources you need are immediately ready for use. IWB resources are provided for every single phonics teaching session. Also included in the Programme are the materials children need to practise and apply their phonic knowledge and skills. There is also a wealth of extra IWB resources that can be used for additional practice, including material for individual or group work. All the Sounds Together materials can be used with a complete class or with smaller groups.
The Smart Board resources, which have been specially designed and created for the Programme, provide not only the essentials – graphemes, phoneme frames, decodable words and sentences – but also the highly-imaginative visual learning materials that make Sounds Together fun, meaningful, interactive and engaging. These visual resources have been carefully created so that they do not support or encourage word–guessing – what they do is to provide an ongoing 'narrative' that builds a relationship with a cast of engaging animal characters (the Sounds Together Friends) who bring the words and decodable texts to life and help to make the learning vivid and memorable. From the start these characters show children that reading for themselves is meaningful and fun.
Sounds Together is the new ‘step-up’ from ‘Letters and Sounds’. It provides schools with a fresh, thorough and systematic approach to teaching and learning phonics that builds on previous professional experiences and understanding, without requiring schools to ‘unlearn’ the positive principles and methods of ‘Letters and Sounds’.
Sounds Together has its roots in ‘Letters and Sounds’ but has been extensively developed and creatively elaborated in the light of all the feedback and learning from the thousands of schools that used ‘Letters and Sounds’ in the national ‘Communication, Language and Literacy Development Programme’ (CLLD). Sounds Together is the only fully approved, systematic, synthetic phonics programme to draw on this knowledge base.
