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Get your whole school on board with Sound Waves Literacy

Sound Waves Literacy 18/2/18

A comprehensive, whole-school approach to literacy ensures consistency across all year levels, promoting a unified learning environment for students and staff. This consistency helps to reinforce spelling, reading and vocabulary skills, leading to better results.

With Sound Waves Literacy, you can deliver explicit teaching and targeted practice that is consistent, comprehensive and cohesive from Foundation through to Year 6.

The program follows a carefully controlled sequence. Instruction builds starting with simple phoneme–grapheme relationships before exploring more complex relationships, morphology and etymology.

Tip: To learn more about how the Sound Waves program unfolds, read the Scope and Sequence F–6.

If your school is using Sound Waves across multiple year levels, improve your whole-school approach with these ideas:

Host a free Sound Waves Literacy PD for your staff

One of the biggest positives of a whole school approach is that it allows for collaboration among teachers, enabling you to share best practices, resources, and strategies to support students effectively.

Encourage teachers to come together and share their ideas with the help of a Sound Waves specialist in a free PD workshop.

Our team have a wealth of teaching experience and provide a range of ongoing, tailored professional development to support your successful implementation of the program.

Request a workshop for your school, register for one of our virtual workshops, browse our professional learning articles and more.

Spread the news far and wide

Whether you send out a weekly newsletter or use social media to keep parents up to date with what’s happening in the classroom, make your school’s Sound Waves Literacy program a regular feature of your weekly news.

At the start of the year, introduce Sound Waves Literacy to parents with a brief overview of the approach. For example:

The Sound Waves Literacy approach uses a sound-to-letter strategy, which acknowledges that sounds can be represented in more than one way in written form. This approach focuses first on the basic units of sound in our language – phonemes. It then explores the letters that represent these sounds (graphemes) and how they can be put together to form the written words in our language.

Throughout the year use your weekly news to announce the week’s focus sound. To make it easier for parents to grasp the focus sound, put it into context by listing common graphemes that represent the sound, and a couple of word examples. Use the Standard Student Chart or Extended Student Chart as a reference for your focus sound news feature. For example:

This week’s focus sound is . The most common graphemes that represent this sound are j, g, ge and dge. You’ll find this sound in words such as jellyfish, giraffe, barge and bridge.

Why not take the weekly focus sound news feature one step further by asking parents and students to get involved? Set up a box in your library where students can drop newspaper or magazine clippings of unusual words that contain the week’s focus sound. Then publish the most unusual entry in the following week’s news feature, where you can also ask for submissions related to the next week’s focus sound. For example:

Last week’s word of the week was epiphany, submitted by Sally Simpson in Year 6G. Who will win this week’s word of the week for the sound? Submit your newspaper clipping entries at the library.

Introduce the week’s focus sound at assembly

As the Sound Waves Literacy program is structured to teach the same sequence of sounds throughout the year from Year 1 to Year 6, assembly is the perfect opportunity to introduce the week’s focus sound to all students. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started:

• Have students perform the chant and action.
• Announce three words that contain the focus sound – these could be general words or students’ names.

Stock the library with sound-focused books

Encourage students to pair their systematic synthetic phonics knowledge with their love of reading by stocking your library with books that feature focus sounds. 



Our suite of Sound Waves Decodable Readers are ideal for beginner readers as they have been written to frequently include the focus phoneme–grapheme relationship taught in the corresponding lesson.



For more confident readers – you can also add titles featured on the Sound Waves Recommended Stories List.


Publish the Recommended Stories List in your library, or display the week’s focus sound and a relevant story each week. Your librarian may even like to dedicate a shelf to the week’s Recommended Stories.

By involving your whole school community in the Sound Waves Literacy program, you can create a supportive environment that encourages continuous improvement and literacy success.

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