At Cooloongup Primary School we have introduced Spelling Mastery sessions utilising Soundwaves.

Spelling Mastery is run by staff in small groups for approx 45mins at least once a week per group.

What is Soundwaves?

Soundwaves focuses on the four areas of teaching:

• Phonemic awareness
• Synthetic phonics
• Morphology and
• Etymology

What do those terms mean?

Phonemic awareness: the ability for children to work with phonemes. Phonemes refer to the 43 distinct sounds in the Australian English language that are used to build words. While there are only 26 letters in the English Alphabet, these 43 sounds are formed by some of those letters. eg ch for church, wh (with breath) When, Where, What.

Synthetic phonics: the ability for children to identify phonemes in a word and match to the letter to be able to spell correctly. 

Morphology: this is the study of words and their parts. 

Etymology: to find the roots of a word, the history, revolution or usage of words. This helps children understand the true meaning of different words and how to apply them during their writing. eg. phon (root) sound (meaning) phonic (word example)

How is it implemented?

Soundwaves follows a logical and thorough scope and sequence

the program is organised around the phonemes of Australian English and the graphemes (letter or letter combo) used to represent them in written language.

Our staff deliver an explicit teaching and target way that is comprehensive and cohesive. With targeted practice that allows the students to apply their knowledge and skills in the students book of activities that mirror what has been taught.

What age range?

Soundwaves can begin in foundation years (K-PP) to Year 6, starting with simple phoneme-grapheme relationships before exploring more complex relationships with morphology and etymology.