1. Phonics Screening Information for Parents
Miss Derome

2. What is the Screening?
Pupils is year 1 across the country will be given a list of words to read using blending and segmenting.
Words will gradually get harder.
There will be a mixture of real words and nonsense words to fully check your child’s phonic knowledge and understanding of the sounds system
The test will be one to one and informal.

3. Phonics What’s that all about?
Starting in Reception children will follow the Letters and Sounds programme.
Phase 1 – builds their listening skills in preparation for learning sounds.
Phase 2 – introduces the first 19 phonemes (letter sounds)
Phase 3 – Children will learn more tricky words.
Throughout phases 2 and 3 children will practise their blending and segmenting skills.
Phase 4- Children consolidate what they have learnt so far.
Phase 5- This is covered throughout year one and looks at alternative spellings of the sounds. E.g the ‘ee’ sound which can be represented by ey, ee ,e, y, ea ,ie.

4. Blending and Segmenting explained
Blending is used when reading. Children will use their phoneme recognition to begin to put sounds together in order to make the words.
Segmenting is used when spelling words. Children will know the word they want to write and may sound each letter out in order to write the word correctly or a plausible attempt.

5. Children will need to learn these words by sight.
What’s a tricky word?
These are words that cannot be sounded out. For example:
The, I, no, go, to, he, me, my, be
Children will need to learn these words by sight.

6. Reading books
Children will start reading at lilac band, the books without any words.
As their phonic knowledge and skills progress the children will be able to move on to pink books and continue from there.
One to one correspondence – encourage children to point to each word as they read.
Picture clues – allow and encourage the children to use the pictures in order to help them read the story.

7. How You Can Help at Home
Continuing to read at home every night with your child will help them to apply their skills.
Access Bug Club to play the games and read interactive books.
Login to our school website to access games through the school learning platform.
Use websites listed on the class page of the website.