With these big changes being implemented in Vic, how can the SoM Phonic kit help teachers in the classroom and parents supporting reading at home? I’m very happy to say that things are beginning to change in literacy education in schools. Many Australian state governments have mandated the use of systematic synthetic phonics to teach reading and spelling. This is great news for our new readers because the well-established research evidence shows that this forms the core of the best way to teach all children how to read. It’s not the only factor in teaching children to read, but it is vital. How School of Monsters Can Help Sally Rippin created the School of Monsters to give parents and children a series of books that could be used as a bridge between the ‘decodable readers’ children use at school and chapter books children read independently. With the widespread introduction of the use of phonics in schools, we saw another way that the Monsters could help and we developed the School of Monsters Fun with Phonics Kit. This kit consists of a set of 70 phonics flashcards and a workbook to help children learn one of the most crucial skills in learning to read: being able to automatically associate a letter with the sound it represents. (Grapheme/Phoneme Correspondence). Grapheme/Phoneme Correspondence (GPC) is the relationship between letters or groups of letters (graphemes) and the sounds they make (phonemes). Basically, it's about matching written symbols to their sounds. This kit doesn’t replace you school’s reading program, instead it give you a fun way to practice one of the most fundamental foundational skills. Cool Features of the Phonics Kit 1. Kids love the illustrations, particularly the characters The illustrations on the reverse of the cards provide a ‘memory hook’ for the sounds if your child needs a hint. Remember, hints are okay—this is learning not a test 2. The vowels and digraphs are different colours to help children recognise that they are different 3. This pack goes beyond just the alphabet sounds. It has the most commonly used vowel digraphs. This is sometimes called the ‘extended code’. 4. The cards have the It has the ‘Silent-e’ digraph and open syllable long vowel sounds School of Monsters Phonics Kit Sneaky Secret There’s a sneaky hidden treasure hunt game in the Phonics Workbook. All the sentences have been taken from the School of Monsters books so if you have an eagle-eyed kid who loves finding all the secret jokes in Wheels and Springs and Moving Things, they might like to try and find which School of Monsters stories the sentences come from.