Saint Mary's

Catholic Primary School, Congleton

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Phonics

Monster Phonics

Phonics at Saint Mary's

Phonics is a way of teaching children to read and write by blending and segmenting individual sounds. At Saint Mary’s we use Monster Phonics in our teaching of phonics to develop early literacy skills. Monster Phonics helps children to learn and recall spellings by using colour. Each sound and colour is also represented by a monster that makes a sound. This brings phonics to life and makes phonics lessons at Saint Mary's highly engaging. 

 

Children throughout Nursery, Reception and Key stage 1 take part in daily phonics sessions. These sessions focus on key reading skills such as decoding to read words and segmenting the sounds in a given word to spell. During Phonics lessons we also teach children to read and write ‘tricky words’ also known as ‘sight words.’ These are words that you cannot sound out and children are just expected to remember how to read and write. 

 

Key terms we use in our teaching:

Phoneme – a single unit of sound

Grapheme – a written letter, or group of letter that represent a sound.

Digraph – two letters make one sound (e.g. sh, ch, ai, ea, ou, ow).

Trigraph – three letters make one sound (e.g. igh, ear, air, ure).

Split digraph – two letters make one sound but the letters have been split apart by another letter.

Consonants – b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, z

Vowels – a, e, i, o, u

Segment – to break down the word into its individual sounds to spell (e.g cat can be split into the sounds c-a-t.).

Blend – to put or merge the sounds together to make a word (e.g. the sounds d-o-g are blended to the word ‘dog’.)

Sound buttons – ways of visually isolating different sounds in a word. We use a dot under letters where one letter makes one sound and a line understand digraphs or trigraphs.

Split digraph - a split digraph contains two letters (a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e and u-e) but they are split between a consonant, for example; cake, bike and pure.

 

How you can help at home:

1. Reading every night at home with your child

Every week each child will be sent home a Monster Phonics books at their reading level. Allow your child to read this to you and ask them questions about the story. In addition to the decodable Monster Phonics book, your child will also bring home an additional non-decodable book to share at home. This can either be read to or with them. Remember to read the books more than once, and the power of 3 (accuracy, fluency and understanding).

 

2. Practise reading and writing tricky words

If children know these they are more likely to gain speed and fluency in their reading. See the list below.

 

3. Log into Monster Phonics

Every child in school has a Monster Phonics log in which gives you access to the phonics lesson. Ask your teacher if you need these details again.

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