Elmore Green Primary School
Learning is Limitless - Make Every Moment Count
Phonics
Phonics and Early Reading Leaders: Mrs Wilcox and Miss Wiggin
​
Learning to read is such an important part of learning and it lays the foundations for children to fully experience the rest of the curriculum. Phonics is a method of teaching children to read by linking sounds (phonemes) and the symbols that represent them (graphemes).
At Elmore Green, we use the DfE approved Monster Phonics approach, a highly engaging, synthetic phonics programme.
Monster Phonics allows children to learn new graphemes by grouping monsters with them, providing a fun and easy memory cue. It also uses colour-coding when learning a new grapheme. Once children are secure in their knowledge, the colour is removed and they have learnt the grapheme. This programme allows children to become confident and successful readers, writers and spellers from an early stage in their school life.
There are ten colours and corresponding monsters used within Monster Phonics. Each of the monsters has a backstory to engage children and increase recall of the linked graphemes.
Meet the Monsters:
All children in Reception and Key Stage 1 follow the programme in stages, which range from developing listening skills in readiness to learn the sounds, to then using learnt sounds to read words, to finally applying these to spelling.
Phonics is taught as a discrete lesson, whereas reading and writing are taught separately as part of English lessons. Within daily phonics sessions, your child will recap previous sounds learnt, learn a new sound and practise reading words containing this sound, before applying this to an activity.
Your child will be given access to a Monster Phonics account where they can read e-books suited to their phonetic ability.
Please follow the link to find out more information: DfE Validated Scheme and Ofsted-Ready (monsterphonics.com)
​
​
Progression Maps
Meet the Monsters
Monster Masks
How to read with your child
Word Lists