Year 1 Phonic Check

1. Year 1 Phonic Check Highfields Primary School

2. What is the Year 1 Phonic Reading Check? • The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check is an assessment to confirm whether pupils have learnt their letter sounds and whether they can use them to decode and read a range of words of increasing phonic complexity. • Year 1 pupils will take the phonics screening check between 16th and 20th June. • It is a compulsory requirement that all schools carry out the check. • Class teachers will conduct the phonic check with each Year 1 child in their class on a 1:1 basis.

3. Which words will ‘The Check’ contain? • The Check will contain a mixture of real words (dark, phone, stripe, starling, turnip, picture) and non-words or pseudo words (usk, bamph, stort, straip, blurst). • There will be forty words in total. The pass mark changes each year. Last year they needed to score 32 or more out of 40 to ‘pass’.

4. What will The Check look like?

5. Non-words (alien names)

6. How will I find out the results of ‘The Check’? • If the results are known in time they will be in your child’s end of year report, if not a separate notification will be sent. • If your child does not pass, during year 2 they will continue to be supported through targeted interventions. They then re-sit the check with Year 1.

7. Examples of how are we teaching phonics at school • Flash card recognition • Magnetic letters to make real and non words. • Some sounds are special friends – consonant and vowel digraphs – sh, ch, th and or, ar, ir • Some sounds are special friends but misbehave when they are together so they have a letter to keep them apart – a-e, o-e, u-e, i-e as in cake, phone, huge, smile. • Attendance and lateness issues. • Websites Picnic on Pluto phonics game

8. How can I help my child? • Test or no test, they need to know their letter sounds (all 44 of them) off by heart. PLEASE practise a selection of these each day in half term. • Spend 5 minutes each day reading simple real words and making and reading simple pseudo-words (alien names). Lists are available – please take one. • Encourage your child to read what is there. They are marked wrong if they supply extra letters (plick for pick) or read a non-word egusk as a real word – ask; strom as storm. • https://global.oup.com/education/content/primary/key-issues/phonics/?region

9. Positive Points • Foundation Stage and Year 1 are the crucial years for acquiring letter sounds. It is right that the emphasis of teaching and learning is placed here. • Learning to recognise, read and write the 44 phonemes supports reading, writing and spelling.

10. Potential negatives • I am not allowed to encourage or interact with the children while testing them. They might find this strange. • We track the phonic development of every child, every term – it is unlikely to tell me anything I don’t already know and I would rather be teaching than testing 5 and 6 year olds. • All children must learn their letter sounds but some will acquire them at differing stages. • Some Year 1 children can go further than the test. There is a danger of ‘teaching to test’ rather than teaching to read.

11. Thank you • Thank-you for taking the time to attend this presentation. We hope you now feel confident about the process the children will go through. Spare phonic cards are available