At Bunscoill Rhumsaa we use a systematic synthetic phonics programme called 'Monster Phonics', a DfE validated scheme, which covers six stages of early reading development. Monster Phonics is a highly-engaging, structured, synthetic phonics programme. It accelerates learning by allowing children to learn new graphemes by using monsters to group graphemes for recall and to provide an easy and fun memory cue for children. It also uses colour-coding to highlight the grapheme when teaching a new grapheme. Once taught and secure, the colour is removed. Multisensory focused teaching improves learning. Our children love Monster Phonics, and that high engagement and interest created by the programme further supports learning. As well as the lessons themselves, we also have the entire Monster Phonics reading scheme in school, which means that your child's reading books will be perfectly matched to their phonics lessons in school.
| Phase | Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
| One (Nursery/start of Reception | Activities are divided into 7 aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
| Two (Reception) | Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. |
| Three (Reception) | The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining sounds not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the ‘simple code’, i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. |
| Four (Reception) | No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
| Five (Year 1) | Now we move on to the ‘complex code’. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. |
| Six (Year 2) | Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
Throughout the programme, children will revisit any of the above phases in order to consolidate and embed their phonic knowledge.
Just getting started with phonics? This video will show you how to say the pure speech sounds with your children!