Monster Phonics

Phonics

Intent:

At Creswell Junior School we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. 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..

Aims:

To implement Monster Phonics scheme where

needed throughout KS2.

To use high quality resources which excite the children and encourage them to retain the phonemes and apply to challenging words.

To create an environment and curriculum where phonics is demonstrated and applied throughout children’s learning.

To ensure children are confident with their grapheme, phoneme correspondence knowledge and that they can apply segmenting and blending to ensure they are able to read words which they have never come across before.

Implementation:

Through the teaching of Monster Phonics the children are taught the essential skills needed for reading. Phonics is taught daily to all children Year 3 who have not passed phonics screening at KS1. Here Phonics is delivered in a whole class format because it enables staff to ensure application across subjects embedding the process in a rich literacy environment for early readers. In other Year groups extra support is provided in the form of planned interventions for those children who are working below expected levels. Staff systematically teach learners the relationship between sounds and the written spelling patterns, or graphemes, which represent them. Pupils have regular reading sessions with an adult to ensure the pupils are regularly practising and applying their phonics knowledge. Teachers regularly assess the pupil’s phonics knowledge using the planned Monster Phonics assessments.

The National Curriculum statutory statements will be implemented in the Monster Phonics sequence.

Use the high quality Monster Phonics resources throughout phonics to ensure consistency.

Provide quality first teaching in line with the teaching standards

Provide quality examples and demonstrations of how to say each phoneme and apply to words clearly.

Allow children opportunities to read both real and nonsense words.

 All teachers:

1. Uses assessment to ensure that all children are learning the phonemes in which they need to progress with their reading.
2. Delivers high quality phonics lessons using the Monster Phonics resources.
3. Understand how to progress the children through the Phases and plans precede interventions to ensure progression.
4. Demonstrates clearly the pronunciation of phonemes. . Allow the children time to apply their phonics skills throughout the school day.

Impact:

To measure impact we will ask: What impact has the implementation had on:

*The ability to use recall phonemes with good grapheme, phoneme correspondence

*The ability to segment and blend confidently with real and nonsense words

*The ability to apply phonics skills fluently when reading

*The coverage of phonemes

*The ability to apply their phonics skills and apply to other areas of the curriculum.

A Phonetic skill or phoneme is mastered when the children are able to 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. This will be assessed through assessment, tracking, pupil progress meetings, performance management, moderation and standardisation.

 How does Monster Phonics work?

At Creswell Junior School, we believe that providing engaging, fun and interactive phonics lessons is the key to successful and enthusiastic readers and writers. We have adopted the Monster Phonics scheme that uses fun characters to help the children engage with their learning, make connections and as a result make rapid progress with both their reading and writing. Each lesson focuses on a new phoneme (sound) whilst recapping and revisiting those previously taught. Lessons are based around a variety of games and tasks that help the children to engage and embed new learning into the long-term memory. Learn more about Monster Phonics below.

What is Monster Phonics?

• The 26 letters of the alphabet and combinations of these letters make 44 speech sounds in English.
• The 44 sounds (phonemes) are spelt by 144 different letter combinations (graphemes). For example, the sound A is spelt 5 different ways ay (play), ai (train).
• Traditional ways of learning to spell can be time-consuming and for some children they are ineffective.
• Monster Phonics categorises sounds into 10 areas and uses the Monsters as a categorisation. Each monster has a different colour. That colour represents that way of spelling the sound.

Why does Monster Phonics improve learning?

• The children learn through the assignment of colour and the linkage of the sound, as well as seeing the colour, creating more ways of remembering the spelling.
• The games, songs and activities within the programme continuously reflect this way of learning, so that structure is constantly seen, heard and experienced by the children. This consistency is critical in ensuring that a complicated language is learnt in the most simplistic way.
• High-frequency words are learnt much faster with Monster Phonics. These words make up 65% of the words used in reading
• The colour-coded grapheme system is unique to Monster Phonics; each coloured grapheme is paired with a monster character that makes the same sound to give audio-visual prompts that help children ‘see’ each sound within a word and pronounce it correctly. Our monsters are really sound cues to help children remember how to read and pronounce graphemes

Click on the YouTube videos below to see the actions and how to pronounce each sound correctly.