At Saxon Wood School we aim to foster a love and enjoyment of reading and encourage all children to read regularly both at home and in school, experiencing a selection of books from a wide range of genres and authors. The whole school stops to read just before lunch for DEAR (Drop everything and read).

All children are taught phonics, early reading and communication, daily. In the EYFS curriculum extending through to the Enquiry and Discovery curriculum, phonics is taught through thur Monster Phonics programme. This programme is a structured synthetic programme that teaches both reading and spelling.

The child progresses through the scheme according to their individual needs and at Saxon Wood School we stream the three classes (Squirrel, Badger and Hedgehog) into 5 groups - led by our highly skilled teachers and support staff to ensure that the children are working with a group of peers who are at roughly the same stage as them in their reading journey.

A lot of revision and repetition is built-in as well as the application of phonics skills in all reading and writing. Monster Phonics provides formative assessment from which teachers can plan a child's next steps in reading.