What we believe at St Mary's:

At St Mary’s Catholic Primary School, we believe that reading is at the heart of all learning. When children develop strong skills in reading, writing and speaking, they open the door to every other subject and to a lifetime of learning.

We know that confident readers become confident learners. That’s why we make sure our approach to phonics and early reading gives every child the best possible start — whatever their background or learning needs. By building a love of reading from the very beginning, we help our pupils grow in confidence, curiosity and understanding of the world around them.

Our Phonics Programme:

At St Mary's we use Monster Phonics which is an enhanced systematic, synthetic phonics programme. It teaches phonics in a structured way whilst providing additional multisensory support to make learning more memorable and fun. It uses colour coding and monster sound cues to support learning.

We start teaching phonics in Nursery using Monster Phonics ‘Foundations Programme’ and then the main programme starts in Reception to ensure children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. Within the programme, there is a clear emphasis on practising phonic skills of sound identification, blending to read and segmenting to spell. The programme runs from Nursery to Year 2 and is used, where necessary, it is used as an intervention in Key Stage Two.

Using the Monster Phonics Programme, our children are able to tackle unfamiliar words they read. Through teaching, we model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics and in shared reading and writing which takes place outside our phonics lessons, across the curriculum. We have a strong focus on language development for our children, setting high expectations and modelling correcting, as we know that speaking and listening are crucial to develop reading and writing across the whole curriculum.

Through Phonics teaching, we aim to teach all children to:

• apply the skill of blending phonemes in order to read words
• segment words into their constituent phonemes in order to spell words
• learn that blending and segmenting words are reversible processes
• read high frequency words that do not conform to regular phonic patterns
• read texts and words that are within their phonic capabilities as early as possible
• decode texts effortlessly so all their resources can be used to comprehend what they read

Information for Parents:

To find out more about Monster Phonics, head over to their website where there are lots of handy videos to help you support your child's reading journey. 

https://monsterphonics.com/phonics-support-for-parents/#