Reading

Reading Intent

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum, a crucial part of our daily experience and is essential for developing educational and social progress. It is our vision to ensure every child achieves their full potential to become confident, enthusiastic readers and understanding members of society. As inspiring role models of literature, it is our intention to nurture a love of reading, to immerse children in high quality texts, and to develop a thirst for discovery. We strive to cultivate a community with strong abilities in both the spoken and written word, therefore the acquisition of language and vocabulary is of the utmost importance and underpins our regular meaningful discussions and explicit teaching of reading skills. Phonics: we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident readers and writers by learning key phonetic knowledge and applying these to the segmenting and blending of words. Through small incremental steps we build phonetic knowledge systematically using a validated synthetic phonics programme. All children in Reception and Year 1 and Year 2 have daily, dedicated phonics lessons which are delivered through a consistent, effective teaching structure. All resources used to support the phonics learning journey are decodable and closely matched to the children’s needs, differentiated where required. 

Each child receives quality reading lessons each week to develop specific reading skills, including fluency and confidence when reading aloud. This is delivered through our ‘Book Talk’, which links to Jane Considine's Reading Rainbow. Our sessions follow a two week process, where our children are exposed to a wide range of high-quality texts that are discussed and studied in depth.

Phonics Intent

At Wilmcote C of E Primary School, we are committed to ensuring every child develops the skills and confidence to become a fluent reader and writer. To achieve this, we teach Monster Phonics, a highly engaging and effective phonics programme validated by the Department for Education (DfE).

Monster Phonics is a systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme that has been proven to accelerate learning and improve results. Studies have shown that schools fully embedding the scheme typically see a significant increase in their phonics screening scores.

What is Systematic Synthetic Phonics?

Systematic synthetic phonics is recognised as the most effective way to teach children to read. The approach teaches children to:

• Recognise sounds (phonemes) and their corresponding written letters (graphemes).
• Blend these individual sounds together from left to right to read a word (e.g., blending c-a-t to read 'cat').
• Segment words into their individual sounds to spell them.

This systematic approach ensures that children build on their knowledge cumulatively, moving from simple to more complex phonic skills.

The Monster Phonics Approach: 

Making Learning Fun and Memorable

What makes Monster Phonics so successful is its child-centred, multi-sensory approach that brings learning to life. The children love the fun characters, songs, and actions, which create high engagement and a genuine love of learning.

Key features of the programme include:

• Engaging Monster Characters: Each monster has a backstory and represents a specific sound. This provides a fun and easy memory cue for children to recall sounds. Characters like the 'Tricky Witch' help children learn common exception words.
• Clever Colour-Coding: The scheme uses a unique system where sounds are colour-coded. This visual cue helps children to see the link between sounds and spellings, making it easier to decode words, especially those with long vowels, silent letters, or tricky spellings. This colour support is gradually phased out as children become more confident and independent readers.
• Multi-sensory Activities: Lessons are interactive and fun, involving reading, writing, singing, and actions to cater to different learning styles and keep children engaged.

How the Scheme is Structured

Monster Phonics provides a comprehensive, structured programme for children from Nursery through to Year 2, ensuring continuous and consistent progression. Where needed, the scheme can be continued to Year 6.

• Systematic Progression: The teaching sequence is logical and incremental. Children begin by learning a defined group of single letter sounds, allowing them to start reading and spelling simple words early on. The programme then progresses to more complex consonant and vowel digraphs (where two or three letters make one sound) and longer words. Common exception words are taught alongside this progression.
• Daily Lessons: The programme is designed for daily teaching sessions with small groups or whole classes. Each lesson follows a similar structure throughout, ensuring consistency.
• Decodable Reading Books: The scheme includes its own set of fully aligned decodable reading books. These books are closely matched to the sounds the children have been taught, allowing them to practise their skills and build confidence without needing to guess words. Children love the challenge of working their way through the book series.

We also use the colour-coding and characters to support learning throughout the school day, for example, on classroom labels and working walls, to provide continuous reinforcement of phonic knowledge.

Supporting Every Child

Monster Phonics is designed to help every child succeed. The programme includes comprehensive assessment materials to track progress and provides guidance and resources for interventions to support any children who may be at risk of falling behind. Its multi-sensory and visual nature makes it particularly effective for children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) and those for whom English is an Additional Language (EAL).

Engaging Parents

We believe that a strong home-school partnership is vital. Monster Phonics supports this by providing parent logins and regular webinars to help you understand how phonics is taught at school and how you can best support your child's reading journey at home.