Phonics
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Monster Phonics is a DfE validated systematic synthetic phonics programme.
Monster Phonics is child-centred and improves results. Children make progress because the approach is meaningful, interactive, and easy to understand, creating high engagement. The systematic colour-coding of graphemes linked to phoneme monsters makes phonics easier to understand. Children also love the monsters, and this brings phonics to life. Our activities are multisensory requiring reading, writing, singing and actions. Typically, schools that fully embed Monster Phonics increase phonics screening scores by 15% points in the first year. Studies also show a 23-month improvement in reading age over a 5-month period. These gains can be attributed to the child-centred systematic phonics teaching that underpins Monster Phonics.
Monster Phonics
Monster Phonics is our whole school Phonics scheme. Monster Phonics is a DfE validated child-centred phonics programme. We believe that our programme and approach to phonics gives our children the best opportunity to be successful with early reading as well as empowering our teachers with excellent subject knowledge and high-quality planning and resources. This ensures children enjoy and get the most from their phonics lessons.
Monster Phonics uses a systematic colour-coding of graphemes linked to phoneme monsters which makes phonics easier to understand. The phonics activities are multisensory requiring reading, writing, singing and actions.
Intent
At Billinge St Aidan's, we aim to ensure that all children develop a lifelong love of reading. We believe that active encouragement of reading for pleasure is a core part of every pupil’s educational entitlement, whatever their background or attainment because extensive reading and exposure to a broad range of texts contribute widely to each pupil’s educational achievement.
For our learners, it is vital that we teach high quality phonics using our systematic phonics programme whilst also implementing a whole language-based classroom environment.
We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Through phonics children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to read words. The teaching of phonics is of high priority to create confident readers of any age.
Implementation
Through the teaching of Monster Phonics, the children are taught the essential skills needed for reading. Phonics is taught daily to all children in Nursery, Reception and Key Stage 1. Phonics is delivered in a whole class format where appropriate. Staff systematically teach learners the relationship between sounds and the written spelling patterns, or graphemes, which represent them. Children have regular reading sessions with an adult to ensure the children are regularly practising and applying their phonics knowledge. Teachers regularly assess the pupil’s phonics knowledge using the planned Monster Phonics assessments.
Impact
To measure impact we assess the child’s ability to:
- Recall phonemes with good grapheme, phoneme correspondence
- Segment and blend confidently with real and nonsense words
- Apply phonics skills fluently when reading
- Apply their phonics skills to other areas of the curriculum
A Phonetic skill or phoneme is mastered when the children can read confidently and apply the phoneme in a range of words, unaided. The children should be able to apply the sound and their segmenting and blending to a range of real and nonsense words.
Teaching Approach
Staff across school have completed Monster phonics training level 1 and 2. This ensures that there is consistency across the school which is key to its success. Any children identified as not meeting the learning objectives that day are identified and picked up for same day keep up intervention. Regular and efficient monitoring of children’s development in phonics is essential if they are to become competent and confident readers, and subsequently writers. The Monster Phonics programme has a clearly mapped out set of assessments which allows for checking children’s grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC), knowledge of High-Frequency Words (HFWs) and Common Exception Words (CEWs) for reading and writing.
All teachers ensure that phonics is embedded throughout daily classroom practice. Focused phonics intervention and in class support is provided for those who still require phonics in Year 3 and KS2.