Year 1 phonics screening

The children have daily phonics lessons. words sounds blend Children are taught to read by breaking down words ‘graphemes’ into separate sounds or ‘phonemes’. They are then taught how to blend these sounds together to hear and read the whole word. d – o – g There are around 40 different sounds.

Every Year 1 child in the country will be taking the statutory phonics screening check in June. The Phonics Screening Check is meant to show how well your child can use the phonics skills they’ve learned up to the end of Year 1, and to identify students who need extra phonics help. The Department for Education defines the checks as “short, light-touch assessments” It is a list of 40 phonetically decodable words containing a mixture of real and non words. Non-words (or nonsense words, or pseudo words) are a collection of letters that will follow phonics rules your child has been taught, but don’t mean anything – your child will need to read these with the correct sounds to show that they understand the phonics rules behind them. This is deemed important so that all children are not just reading from memory but are made to use their decoding and blending skills. It is not a reading test! It is not a reading test!

The check will take 4 to 9 minutes to complete; (children can take rest breaks between words if required) They will be asked to ‘sound out’ a word and blend the sounds together. e.g. d-o-g – dog Children will be told if the word is a real or ‘alien’ word, with a corresponding alien image.

Teachers will conduct all of the screening checks with the children The children will complete the check one to one in a quiet area of the school. We are not permitted to indicate to the children at the time whether they have correctly sounded out and / or blended the word.

It is important to remember that this is not a reading test and focuses upon assessing your child’s ability to decode real words and non-words. Decoding is the process of reading a word by saying the sounds then joining, or blending, those sounds together to form the word. herks h-er-k-s herks

Being able to decode requires 2 skills: 1- knowledge of letter-sound correspondences (knowing the phonemes that letters/groups of letters make) 2- skills for blending, chunking, and segmenting words into symbols and sounds (being able to look at a word, recognise the different phonemes, them repeat saying them so that the whole word can be read) spike sp-i-k-e spike

1- knowledge of letter-sound correspondences (knowing the phonemes that letters/groups of letters make) Graph – 1 letter making one sound. With the word cat, the children should say c-a-t Digraph- 2 letters making one sound. With the word cow, the children should say this as c-ow and not c-o-w Trigraphs- 3 letters making one sound night the children should say this as n-igh-t and not n-i-g-h-t which does not sound like night. Split digraphs- 2 vowels with a consonant in between. Use to be known as the magic e! spine - i_e home – o_e cube – u_e

Can you spot the graphs, digraphs, trigraphs and split digraphs in these words? quigh splot strike Sound lines and buttons help to show how the words can be segmented. ‘Sound talking’ can help to blend these sounds to read the word.

Activities to support your child’s knowledge of letter- sound correspondences: Play ‘I spy’. Ask your child to recognise how many digraphs are in a word. Ask your child to locate words with a given phoneme in their reading books. How many words can you spot with the /ai/ phoneme? As children begin to explore alternative spelling choices, they could look for words with the /ai/ phoneme and the different letters that represent this sound. church The snail got on the train. The snail put a cake on the tray.

Activities to support your child’s skills for blending, chunking, and segmenting words into symbols and sounds Asking your child to fetch their c-oa-t or pick up the b-l-ue c-r-ay-o-n. Writing words and cutting up them up into different sounds or writing words into phoneme frames can all practise and reinforce these skills. dex.htmlhttp:// dex.html.

Always be positive and give lots of praise and encouragement. to ‘have a go’ (no clues can be given to your child). Practising and reinforcing their knowledge and skills is key as they need to be able to apply, rather than learn a given set or words. Having the confidence to ‘give it a go!’ Developing fluency in applying these skills can be supported through regular reading. Remember to talk about the meaning if your child does not understand the word they have read. This is useful as some of the real words maybe unknown to children and they haven’t had experience of them yet (nigh, tantrum, scram).

The children will be scored against a national standard (determined by DfE) We will inform you of the results during the summer term on their school report. You will receive feedback whether your child was below, just below, met or exceeded the threshold. If your child’s score falls below the national standard they will be supported and will complete the screening in year 2.