Year One Phonic Screening checks whether children can read words by blending 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 take it again at the end of Year 2. To meet the standard, children currently have 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 of 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 the letters and how to combine them to read simple words, for example, they would say all three letter sounds. cat/ to read the word cat. For mixture we mean ‘say the sounds softly and faster so they sound like the word’.

However, children need to learn more than just the initial sounds of letters to pronounce even fairly simple words. let’s take the floor 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 have learned that the three letters high sounds like the long /i/ (like in icy) then they can more easily pronounce the word light and then combine the three sounds to read the word correctly.

Three letters that make a sound is called a trigraph. Two letters that make a sound is called a digraph. Sometimes different digraphs can make the same sound. Think about the long vowel sound /has/ like in aprons. This can be written in different ways:

have like in bread – p/have/not

Yeslike in day -d/Yes/

oh 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, for example dam to dame.

Over the course of 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 knowledge and the ability to blend phonemes (sounds) to read real and non-verbal words that is assessed in the first grade phonics assessment.