The Impact of Monster Phonics
Our children, staff and parents have accepted Angry Red A and his friends into our school family. When our children see sounds they shout the characters names, followed by a huge smile on their faces. They love to read books, spot the sounds, and write words and sentences, choosing, using our displays, the correct spelling for the sounds. The Monsters have enabled the children to become more independent than ever before. We have a high number of parents within the two terms that we have used that access the e-Books at home with their children.
Now for the data… well that speaks for itself!
We introduced Monster Phonics at the beginning of the Spring term and when we completed a phonics assessment at the end of the Summer term and the number of children, both Year 1 and 2, who have met or nearly met the expected level for phonics is extraordinary.
At the end of the Autumn term, we had low numbers of year one and year two children meeting or on track to meet expected standards in phonics. Something needed to change. We introduced Monster Phonics at the beginning of the spring term and when we completed a phonics assessment at the end of the summer term and the number of children, both year one and two, who have met or nearly met the expected level for phonics is extraordinary.
The Challenges Faced by the School
The challenges we faced as a school were the engagement of the children particularly the boys. We followed a mixture of Letters and Sounds, Twinkl etc. We were finding staff were less enthusiastic, there wasn’t any consistency between EYFS and KS1. We felt as a school we need to inject creativity into our learning and teaching of phonics. We looked around at the different schemes available and weighed up the pros and cons. Spring Lockdown was also a challenge with school remaining open for key/critical worker children and the rest of the children accessing remote learning at home.
How Monster Phonics Addressed these Challenges
We completed the free trial and we found that Monster Phonics was fully adaptable for all of our children regardless of learning style or need, it engaged the boys particularly, it supported our lower ability but also challenged our higher ability children and the children and staff were enthusiastic about teaching phonics for the first time in a long time.
The resources and display materials are colourful, eye-catching and enhanced our classroom environment. The displays that we created using the Monster Phonics resources enabled our children to become independent when reading and spelling as they always look to the display to support them when they are reading and writing regardless of the subject they are learning.
The Monster Phonics books are fantastic. Our children love to read them, they love to spot the characters that they are going be using in their reading. We also subscribed to the e-books and this has ensured that we are providing all of our children with phonics books tailored to their phonics ability or current learning in phonics.
During the spring lockdown was the time we introduced the new phonics programme fully to the children and their parents. Having such a well-structured, easy to follow, fully adaptable scheme to share with parents was brilliant to enable the children (and parents) to continue learning at a very difficult time. The feedback we have had from our parents has been simply amazing. With the staff, parents and children on board, Monster Phonics will enable our children to love reading and see that they are writers.
The Monster Phonics teacher and parent webinars have been very well received and accessed.
The Future
We cannot wait for the next academic year to continue with Monster Phonics and see the new and amazing ideas and resources the creative Monster Phonics team come up with.