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Sound Waves Literacy Articles & Videos

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Start the week with story time

Sound Waves Literacy

Why not introduce this week’s focus sound with one of the Sound Waves Recommended Stories?
Which approach works best: Systematic synthetic phonics or embedded phonics?

Sound Waves Literacy

When it comes to spelling, a large body of evidence identifies phonics as a vital component of instruction in the primary years. Most educators are aware of this consensus, but debate continues to linger regarding the effectiveness of two specific…
Can one grapheme represent more than one sound?

Sound Waves Literacy

Yes! One grapheme (letter) can represent more than one sound – here are some examples:
Exploring all sounds: Fun ideas to kickstart your spelling lessons

Sound Waves Literacy

A sound exploration session is the perfect way to tune students’ ears and eyes to recognise phonemes (sounds) and focus on graphemes (letter/s). Before you introduce the week’s focus phoneme, conduct a quick and easy whole-class activity that explores a…
What’s the difference? Understanding phonological awareness, phonemic awareness and phonics

Sound Waves Literacy

Updates to the Australian Curriculum are shining a spotlight on teaching phonological awareness (in particular, phonemic awareness) and phonics. So whether you’re a novice or have been teaching spelling and reading this way for many years, there’s never been a…
Learning is child's play! Four fun phonics games no student can resist

Sound Waves Literacy

Wind back the clock a few decades and you’d be lucky to find more than a handful of teachers using games as serious (and seriously fun!) teaching tools.
Sound Waves Charts: The order of phonemes

Sound Waves Literacy

The order of the consonant phonemes on the Sound Waves charts is essentially alphabetical. As most students learn alphabetical order early in life, the phoneme order on the charts enables students to find grapheme examples for phonemes quickly and easily when spelling…
Why does Sound Waves Literacy only teach 43 phonemes?

Sound Waves Literacy

Ever wondered why Sound Waves Literacy has only 43 sounds while some other phonics programs have 44? The reason is simple: the 44th sound is rarely spoken in standard Australian English. It’s far more common in British English. In other words,…
The vowel sound in 'old' – a good example of allophony

Sound Waves Literacy

By Tom Mylne, PhD (Linguistics), GradDipEd.
The purpose of this article is to discuss the pronunciation of “o before l”, as in old, doll, dole, bowl, and many other words. But first, a few words about the theoretical framework.