Year One Phonic Screening tests whether children can read words by combining the sounds they have learned during their phonetics lessons at school. Year 2 pupils who previously did not meet the check standard at the end of Year 1 must redo it at the end of Year 2. To meet the standard, children must currently read correctly at least 32 of the 40 words on the check.
Reading is simplified with phonetics
The ‘phonetics 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 reception, children are taught that words are made up of individual sounds or phonemes. In their first phonics sessions, they learn the initial sounds of letters and how to combine them to read simple words, for example, they would say the three letter sounds. cat / read the word cat. For mix we mean “saying the sounds softly and quickly so that they sound like the word.”
However, children need to learn more than just the sounds of the initial letters to pronounce even fairly simple words. Let’s take the word light. If a child tried 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 know that the three letters IG H sounds like the long / I / (like in ice) then they can pronounce the word more easily light and then combine the three sounds to read the word correctly.
Three letters that make a sound are called a trigraph. Two letters that make a sound are called digraphs. Sometimes different digits can make the same sound. Think about the sound of the long vowel /to/ like in apron. This can be written in different ways:
I have like in bread – P /I have/not
Yeslike in day – D /Yes/
ae like in Name – this is known as a divided digraph or ‘magic e’. The ‘e’ at the end of the word makes the vowel in the middle of the word long, for example, dam a dame.
Over the course of the two years at the 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:
lyrics
ladle
It is this phonetic awareness and the ability to combine phonemes (sounds) to read real words and not words that is tested on the first-year phonics test.