Which phonics approach involves learning sounds represented by letters and then blending those sounds?

The correct approach for learning sounds represented by letters and then blending those sounds is the synthetic phonics method. This method emphasizes the teaching of individual sounds (phonemes) associated with letters or letter combinations (graphemes) and focuses on blending these sounds together to form words.

In synthetic phonics, students first learn the corresponding sounds for each letter and digraph, and then they practice blending these sounds to read words. For instance, a student will learn the sounds for the letters 'c', 'a', and 't' and then combine these sounds to read the word "cat." This systematic approach is particularly effective for developing decoding skills, as it encourages students to break down words into their constituent sounds.

Other approaches, such as analytic phonics, focus on taking whole words and analyzing them to identify sounds rather than starting from the individual sounds. Whole word phonics emphasizes memorization of entire words rather than decoding them, while contextual phonics incorporates phonics instruction within the context of reading. Thus, while each method has its merits, synthetic phonics is specifically designed to build phonetic decoding abilities through the direct teaching of sound-letter associations followed by blending.