Summary: Sound Waves is a word study program designed to develop reading, spelling and writing skills through phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is essentially a knowledge and understanding of the sounds and sound patterns of our language. What is the Sound Waves approach? The Sound Waves approach uses a sound-to-letter strategy, which acknowledges that sounds can be represented in more than one way in written form. The Sound Waves approach focuses first on the basic units of sound in our language - phonemes. It then explores the letters that represent these sounds and how they can be put together to form the written words in our language. The phonemic approach is great because it promotes deeper understanding by replacing rote learning with strategies for reading, writing and spelling. It includes clever ideas for direct instruction and play-based learning activities.