Year 1 Phonic Screening Check

2020

What is the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check?

• The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check is an assessment to confirmwhether children have learnt their letter sounds and whether theycan use them to decode and read a range of words of increasingphonic complexity.

• Throughout the country children in Year 1 will take the phonicsscreening check the week commencing Monday 8th June. Children inYear 2 will also take the check if they did not achieve the requiredresult when in Year 1 or if they have not taken the test before.

• It is a compulsory requirement that all schools carry out the check.

• Class teachers will conduct the phonic check with each child in theirclass on a 1:1 basis.

Which words will ‘The Check’ contain?

• The Check will contain a mixture of real words (dark, phone,stripe, starling, turnip, picture) and nonsense or pseudo words(usk, bamph, stort, straip, blurst). We also call these alienwords.

• There will be forty words in total. The pass mark changeseach year. Last year they needed to score 32 or more out of40 to ‘pass’.

• The test will take approximately 10 minutes per child,although all children are different and will complete the checkat their own pace.

Pseudo (nonsense /alien) WordsThe pseudo words will be shown to your child with apicture of an alien. Pseudo words are included becausethey will be new to all pupils; they do not favourchildren with a good vocabulary knowledge or visualmemory of words.

What will The Check look like?

Pseudo Words (alien names)

How will I find out the results of ‘The Check’?

• By the end of the summer term we will report yourchild's results to you. We will also confirm if yourchild has met the standard threshold.

• If your child does not pass, during Year 2 they will continue to be supported through targeted interventions. They will then re-sit the check at the end of Year 2 at the same point in the year.

How do we teach phonics?• In Reception, the children will have been taught the

first 44 sounds (graphemes that make the sounds).• They will have learnt how to sound out and blend

words containing these graphemes when reading.• They will also have learnt how to spell words using

their phonics. They do this by saying the word slowlyto hear the individual sounds and then sounding itout on their fingers, whilst writing the correspondinggrapheme for each sound that they hear in thecorrect order.

• In Year 1 we are now teaching the children all of thealternative graphemes that there are in the Englishlanguage for each sound.

• For example, the children will have learnt ai as agrapheme.

• In Year 1 we teach them that when this sound is the last

sound in a word we need to use the grapheme ay andthat a more common grapheme for this sound in the

middle of a word is a_e as in game, snake.

Speed Sounds• We use a speed sounds chart

like this in the classroom.• This helps the children to

recognise the graphemes when reading.

• We also teach them to choose the grapheme that ‘looks right’ when they are trying to spell a new word.

• Children will continue to learn the final few graphemes on the chart in Year 2.

Examples of how we are teaching phonics at school

• Flash card recognition• Speed sounds – point to a column, children say the

sound or the adult says a sound and the child finds it on the chart.

• Read, Write Inc , which has a ditty for each sound.• Some sounds are special friends – consonant and

vowel digraphs – sh, ch, th, 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. These are called split digraphs.

• Phonics play games

How can I help my child with phonics?• PLEASE practise a selection of the sounds with your child each

day if possible. (Read, write inc flashcards are great for this and we use them in school)

• Spend 5 minutes each day reading simple real words and makingand reading simple pseudo-words (alien names). Example listsare in your pack, but you could also make up your own words.

• Weekly phonics homework – this has a selection of real andpseudo words for the phonemes the children have been learningthat week.

• Encourage your child to read what is there. They are markedwrong if they supply extra letters (plick for pick) or read a non-word eg usk as a real word – ask; strom as storm. Remind themto sound out each word and then blend together before sayingeach word. Even if they think they know the word straight away!

Writing and SpellingAlthough the screening check only tests whether the children can apply their phonics skills when reading, the children also need to use and apply the same knowledge when writing.

Practising writing the graphemes that make the sounds in isolation and when sounding out words for spelling will also really help your child to fully embed the graphemes in their long term memory.

Writing and SpellingThe Read, Write Inc rhymes also help the children to remember the correct letter formation for each single letter sound.There is a copy of this in your pack.

Useful Websites

www.phonicsplay.co.uk (choose phase 5)

www.letters-and-sounds.com

www.ictgames/forestphonicsOnline

These are all detailed on our website – please look in the English section!

Thank you

Thank you for coming and we appreciate the work you do at home with your child.

This is not just about passing the test. Learning to recognise, read and write the 44 phonemes supports reading, writing and spelling and thus every aspect of your child’s learning!