In 2021 it was announced that by ensuring high-quality phonics teaching the government wants to improve literacy levels to:

• give all children a solid base upon which to build as they progress through school
• help children to develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information

Warren Road put a team of staff together to look at what we wanted to improve in our phonics teaching. We wanted to ensure consistency of teaching and resources across the classes and ensure that all staff whenever they arrive at the school have access to immediate phonics training. The team looked into a variety of different schemes that had met the government validation criteria. 

They finally settled on Monster Phonics, which is highly engaging and incorporates great use of kinesthetic learning which the team felt was missing in other schemes. It also came with an accessible training package.

Each phoneme is linked to a colour monster who has a story. Each grapheme is colour coded to the monster giving children clues to the phoneme, thus making it more accessible for all learners. There is a real focus on spelling patterns which would also support those further up the school.

There was flexibility to incorporate our current reading resources, helping to keep costs down while also ensuring a wider range of reading tastes and needs are catered for.

Intervention is made from adapted lessons rather than repeated lessons meaning children who struggle get another chance to ‘keep up’ in a different way more suited to them.

Cost was reasonable and appeared good value, set out over 3 years with a yearly subscription thereafter.

The scheme was offered on trial to all Reception, Year 1 & 2 classes for one month. After which feedback from staff and children was extremely positive resulting in our purchase of the scheme in April 2022.

Should you like to learn more about our phonics scheme please check out the parent workshop presentations in school on 7th October (posted on our website shortly after), look at the Monster Phonics website https://monsterphonics.com/ and watch out for the new Early Reading webpage on our website coming soon!