S5 E3 - Quick Phonics Assessment to Start the Year

Many schools have adopted a phonics program and are using the phonics assessment that comes with that . They use the assessment at the beginning of the year , the end of the year and hopefully , at many points in between to evaluate the impact of instruction .

Even if your school is in this position and you enter the new school year with a spreadsheet of data about where students are up to at the end of the previous year , you may still want to spend a little time doing some simple check-in assessment .

After all , the most effective way to get a handle on where your class is sitting is to do some assessment yourself . Nothing beats watching students respond in real time . The other thing to consider is that data might indicate what lessons covered right at the end of the previous school year , rather than what students have consolidated into their long-term memory .

It's entirely possible for students to have been introduced to new phoneme-grapheme correspondences in weeks six , seven or eight of term four of the previous year , but not have consolidated that new learning . Launching straight into new content risks creating a gap in the student's learning .

So , whether you have established phonics data for your class or not , it's worth taking some time to conduct a simple check-in about phonics knowledge with your class at the start of the year , regardless of the grade you're teaching . This all sounds good , but I can practically hear you saying but Jocelyn , where am I supposed to find time for all that assessment ?

The good news is that for a simple check-in , you don't have to sit every child down one by one and assess them . Today I'm sharing a simple method of getting a roundabout sense of where your class is sitting in their phonics knowledge . From there you can do further investigation to find out precisely what different children need .

Let's dive into the steps that you can follow and some of the considerations around this . Number one make sure that you have enough whiteboards and working markers for each child , along with something for them to rub their board off with . If that's a tissue or a paper towel , then great .

If you don't have enough whiteboards , really good quality plastic sleeves with a piece of paper inside them on a clipboard work well too . You'll also need the scope and sequence document for your school's phonics program .

If you're a Resource Room member or you use Reading Success in Action as your phonics program , you can find that information on the Resource Room site or in your decoding books . But every systematic synthetic phonics program has this information so grab what your school is already using and get ready to check in .

Number two determine the phonics knowledge that your students should have learned in the year before they reached your classroom . If you're teaching Year One , that's the basic code . If you are teaching Year Two , that's the complex code .

If you are teaching Upper Primary, Year Three to Six , that's the whole code , including multiple spellings of various phonemes or sounds . Your starting point for instruction and this check-in will depend on your student's age and what you know about them . So just decide on the starting point that makes sense to you and have an educated guess .

If after the first few questions , most students know all of it , well , you can move ahead . If most students are weak in the knowledge , you can go back . Don't try to test the whole code at once , though . Break up what you want to know into small sections and check in on them in manageable chunks , say five graphemes or phonemes per day .

This ensures that you don't tire your students out and it allows you to make the analysis of what you find much more manageable . It's so much easier to check in on five bits of information for your class than it is to be overwhelmed with 30 or 40 .

To conduct the check-in , sit all of your students either at desks or on the mat , or a combination of these , but place them far enough away from each other that they can't copy . The other ways you can limit copying is to sit students who you know need extra support closest to you and keep the pace of the expected response snappy .

So if you give the children 20 seconds between each question , then they're going to rub things out and second guess themselves and look at what everyone else is doing . So make the assessment, or the check-in, go quite quickly . If you are checking in on the basic code , say the phonemes one at a time , the sounds , and have students write the grapheme .

So you'll say write down /b/ . do not review grapheme cards before you do this check-in, you You want to know what the students have embedded into their long-term memory . This is very much a cold task , because if they know it , they know it . No amount of school holidays or being a bit distracted is going to prevent them from knowing it .

Have the students write across the board and then show you their boards , so they'll have five graphemes , hopefully , written on their board . It's a really good idea , just for your own knowledge , to take a video of this check-in and watch it back later so that you can see who is and isn't trying to copy from their peers .

Kids are terrific at fudging these sorts of assessments . Now , when you take the video , have the camera next to you so that you can capture the class from the front rather than from the back . Just prop an iPad up at the front and the students won't know . . don't Don't have the screen so that they can see themselves, .

they They will be highly distracted , but put it so that the screen's facing away from them and all will be well . ou they have written their graphemes , have the students show you their board and take a photo of the entire class . You can then see in one snapshot who does and doesn't have the code .

To record this information, simply create a table and tick the box if the student has it , or leave it blank if they don't . Resource Room members have access to a spreadsheet where you can enter a one or a zero and the results will be colour- coded for you . Next , if you are checking in beyond the basic code , things are a little different .

Rather than saying write /b/ , you will say write down all of the ways you know how to spell the sound /ay/ . This is much more open-ended and gives you a really good idea of what students know .

Some students will write one grapheme , others will write five , some will write five correct graphemes and others will write two and the other three are kind of just made up . If you say "write down A as in play , there's a good chance that the student will have memorized that common word and then analyze it to get the right answer .

While analogy is a valid spelling strategy , it's not what we want for this . For this , we want to know about the student's phonics knowledge . The reason I'm suggesting that you focus on recall rather than recognition is that if the student can recall and write , they really know the content . If they can't , then their knowledge is incomplete .

It's not enough for the students just to recognise the grapheme and say the correct phoneme . In order for them to spell , they need to be able to recall this information to use it . This is also an opportunity to check in on handwriting and stroke order , which must be automatic for strong writing to occur .

Once you've determined who can and cannot recall graphemes , you'll then decide on which students need a check-in for recognising . If you're a teacher in an upper primary classroom , this will likely be a small number of children who are at significant risk of difficulty .

But be prepared that you'll need to do the recognition or reading part with any student who has significant difficulties with the recall task . In the early years, it's anyone who didn't know what you would expect them to know by that point in their schooling .

The reason you want to do this is that it will help you better understand which correspondences have to be re-taught from scratch and which correspondences can just be focused on in the daily review to consolidate them .

As a rough guide , if the students can automatically and confidently recognise the grapheme but they're wobbly on the recall , you don't need to reteach that grapheme . Just pay special attention to those correspondences in daily review and make sure that you focus on recall rather than recognition .

They can already recognise, we want them thinking about the phoneme , thinking about the grapheme and writing it down automatically . If they can't recognise or recall confidently , the graphemes will need to be taught again , with appropriate follow-up for consolidation . This whole process of checking in for phonics will likely take you about two weeks all up .

A week to do the recall check-in with just a few graphemes a day , and a week to do further assessment with students who needed it . For some students they will need the whole thing assessed for reading . Others will need only a few phonemes or graphemes checked in on .

However , don't wait for week three before you begin to do some consolidation on content the students should have known but didn't . From the first day of the recall task with whiteboards , you can start reviewing and rehearsing with the graphemes students didn't know .

This will mean that you won't waste the first two weeks of school , but also, you'll be able to see which students are able to quickly get back on track with their phonics learning with just a bit of reminding, and which students will need higher intensity instruction . All of this impacts and informs your approach to phonics instruction .

This episode isn't about how to pace and organise phonics instruction in your main teaching . For that you can have a listen to Season 3 , Episode 15 , Four Points to Consider when Pacing Phonics Instruction . You might also like to search my website , jocelynseamereducation . com for the term "phonics .

There are a range of blog posts and podcasts with useful information about early reading instruction , but also in catch-up for the three to six space . And if you are listening to this at the time of recording , you might like to join me for the Reading Success in the Early Primary Years Teach Along that begins in February .

This 12-week course will equip you and your team with lots of practical know-how about reading instruction in the first three years of school .

It's designed to be general enough in nature so that you can get oodles of value regardless of the phonics program you use in your school , but it's specific enough to enable you to take real action to get every child reading . If you're interested in learning more about this course , visit jocelynseamereducation . com/ reading success .

As you prepare for the new school year , remember, the best instruction focuses on student need , not what a program says you should be focusing on each week . Yes , we want to work with our phonics programs with fidelity , but that doesn't have to come at the expense of targeted instruction that meets students at precisely the point they need for strong learning .

We know that this gets you the best outcomes . That's all from me this week . Until next time , happy teaching everyone . Bye .