Year One Phonic Screening checks if children can read words by combining the sounds they have learned during their phonics lessons at school. Year 2 students who did not previously meet the check standard at the end of Year 1 must retake it at the end of Year 2. To meet the standard, children currently need to read correctly at least 32 of the 40 words on the check
Reading is simplified with phonetics
The ‘phonics first’ approach to reading provides children with a simple method for reading words in the early stages of learning to read. They recognize the sounds in words and combine them to say the word.
When they first arrive at school at the front desk, children are taught that words are made up of individual sounds or phonemes. In their first phonics sessions, they learn initial letter sounds and how to combine them to read simple words, for example, they would say the three letter sounds. cat/ to read the word cat. By mix we mean ‘say the sounds softly and faster so that they sound like the word’.
However, children need to learn more than just initial letter sounds in order to pronounce even fairly simple words. let’s take the floor light. If a child were to try to pronounce this word using each of the five letters light it wouldn’t sound like the word and they couldn’t read it. As soon as they have learned that the three letters high sounds like the long /Yo/ (like in frozen) then they can more easily pronounce the word light and then blend the three sounds to read the word correctly.
Three letters that make one sound is called a trigraph. Two letters that make one sound is called a digraph. Sometimes different digraphs can make the same sound. Think about the long vowel sound /TO/ like in aprons. This can be written in different ways:
have like in bread – p/have/No
Yeahlike in day -d/Yeah/
ae like in name – this is known as a split digraph or ‘magic e’. The ‘e’ at the end of the word makes the vowel in the middle of the word long, eg dam to dame.
Over the course of the two years in reception and year 1, children learn at least 40 different digraphs and trigraphs. They also learn to use these sounds to read longer words, that is, words with more than three sounds. Here are some examples:
letter
ladle
It is this phonic awareness and the ability to combine phonemes (sounds) to read real and non-verbal words that is assessed on the first year phonics assessment.