What is the Monster Phonics Approach?

 

Monster Phonics is a highly engaging, structured, synthetic phonics programme. It facilitates learning by using monsters to group graphemes for recall and to provide an easy and fun memory cue for children. It also uses colour-coding to highlight the grapheme when a new one is taught. Once learnt and secure, the colour is removed, this allows all children to become confident and successful readers, spellers and writers from a very early stage in their school life. Each monster has a fun back story to engage the children, and these are used in all areas of the phonics programme. 

 

Meet the Monsters!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Angry Red A -The graphemes that make the long A phoneme are coloured red. e.g. a ai ay a-e 

 

Green Froggy -The graphemes that make the long E phoneme are coloured green. e.g. ee ea y 

 

Yellow I -The graphemes that make the long I sound are coloured yellow. e.g. i-e igh ie i

 

Miss Oh No - The graphemes that make the long O sound are coloured pink. e.g. o o-e oa ow 

 

U-Hoo -The graphemes that make the long U sound are coloured purple. e.g. u u-e ew ue 

 

Cool Blue -The graphemes that make the long oo sound are coloured blue. e.g. oo u-e ew ue 

 

Brown Owl -The graphemes that make the long ow sound are coloured brown. e.g. ow ou 

 

Silent Ghosts - Silent letters are represented by the Silent Ghosts which make no sound. 

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Tricky Witch - The tricky letters are graphemes that have a different phoneme from what has been taught previously. They do not show regular grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC). 

 

How is Monster Phonics Taught at Whitchurch?

 

Nursery

 

The Foundations Programme develops speaking and listening skills. Children learn to become attuned to the sounds and begin to develop oral blending and segmenting skills. This teaching lays the foundations for teaching of systematic synthetic phonics. 

The government Phase 1 curriculum consists of 7 aspects. Each aspect contains 3 strands: 

· Tuning into sounds (auditory discrimination) 

· Listening and remembering sounds (auditory memory and sequencing) 

· Talking about sounds (developing vocabulary and language comprehension 

 

Reception and Key Stage 1

 

Monster Phonics is designed as a whole-class Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme for children in Reception and Key Stage 1. Daily 20 to 30-minute discrete phonics sessions are delivered by trained teaching staff. Monster Phonics uses a five-part lesson structure in KS1. 

 

Guided reading

Guided reading sessions take place 3 times per week. Using the Monster Phonics reading scheme enables children to apply their phonics learning to carefully matched phonetically decodable books. 

 

1:1 Reading

Daily 1:1 reading with an adult takes place for the lowest 20% of each cohort. This enables them to not only apply their phonics learning, but also to build their reading fluency. This is a keep up not catch-up approach. 

 

EYFS

In EYFS, phonic learning is practised throughout the day in the areas of provision. Children who are not yet ready to read a book practise their reading through flashcards, word and picture matching, sound identification in the environment etc. 

 

Home Reading Books

The children will not only bring a Monster Phonic book home, but parents will also have access to the Monster Phonic eBooks. This enables children to practice their guided reading book to further develop their fluency and provides a clear guide for parents to support decoding and comprehension. 

In addition, children are given an additional non-decodable book to share at home. This can either be read to your child or with them. 

We hope you enjoy supporting your child’s reading journey using Monster Phonics. 

Reading is the foundation to all learning; it is the key to success academically and ultimately in the future.