Synthetic phonics are always brought in when a child first starts school, as written words can be unfamiliar to them at this stage and they need simple and clear introduction on how to blend words in order to independently pronounce a word. Children are not expected to read books until they are competent enough at phonic word-reading to make book-reading practicable. Synthetic phonics starts by introducing a few high-frequency words such as ‘the’, ‘was’, ‘said’ only after children have acquired the technique of reading simple regular words
