Early Reading & Phonics

02/11/23: We are delighted to announce that Monster Phonics, has been awarded Resources Educational Supplier of the Year 2023 at the GESS Show. 

There is a strong emphasis on reading and phonics in Early Years and Key Stage 1, which gives children the necessary building blocks to become confident and independent learners. Phonics is an important part of the curriculum in EYFS, Year 1 and Year 2, to ensure a progressive and secure development of early reading skills enabling all children to decode words effectively. Children learn the skills of blending sounds for reading and segmenting words for spelling.

At Castle Camps Primary School, our infant children are taught phonics in discrete daily lessons. This knowledge is then applied in English and across other areas of the curriculum. We use ‘Monster Phonics’ which is a DfE validated systematic synthetic phonics programme and ‘covers all the statutory requirements of the Reception and the KS1 National curriculum for synthetic phonics-based reading and writing’.

Monster Phonics uses characters, colours, songs and actions to make phonics teaching and learning exciting and memorable. The children are excited to learn and they look forward to lessons, wondering which character they will be learning with in each lesson. The reading books that children take home are closely matched to their ongoing phonics teaching and Monster Phonics books are set for home learning as E-books.

At Castle Camps Primary School, we appreciate that young children learn at different rates using a range of learning styles. Subsequently, progress in phonics is constantly monitored so that learning can be tailored to the needs of individual children. We are fortunate in that we have small classes with mixed year groups enabling children to benefit from both peer and ability groupings.

All children are assessed towards the end of year 1 using the Phonics Screening Check. This is simply a 1:1 assessment with the class teacher that allows the children to demonstrate their blending skills to read a mix of real words and pseudo-words (made up words).  For activities to support this see the following link: