Phonics

Mrs Jenkins

Phonics Lead

In the early stages of learning to read, children are taught phonics – the relationship between sounds and letters. While reading involves many different skills, research shows that systematic synthetic phonics provides children with the essential building blocks needed to decode words successfully, giving the skills to develop confident readers.

Through phonics, children learn to identify and blend sounds together to read words. For example, they learn to break a word such as book into its individual sounds: b-oo-k, and then blend these sounds together to read the whole word. This approach helps children develop the confidence to tackle unfamiliar words independently as well as supporting their decoding of new words.

As children develop their phonics knowledge, they practise their skills using carefully matched reading books that support their current level of learning.

At our school, we follow the Monster Phonics scheme. This is an award-winning, multi-sensory phonics programme which uses colour to consistently code for key graphemes in English. It is unique, in that it uses character (monster) phoneme cues and colour-coding to represent the long vowel sounds, silent letters and tricky letters.

We know supporting reading at home can sometimes feel challenging.
Monster Phonics have a selection of short, easy-to-follow videos that explain phonics in a simple way.

Click the links below to discover free resources and practical tips to help your child build confidence and develop a love of reading.

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