Narrator:

The Phonics Screening Check is an opportunity for students to demonstrate what they know and can do when reading.

It can support teachers to plan for students learning by providing them with information to target their teaching.

The Phonics Screening Check is a short online assessment that individually assesses a student’s phonic knowledge and skills.

The Check assesses how students blend sounds together to read a word.

Simone Austin, Brewarrina Central School:

I was quite surprised with some of the results in the assessment. I had some students who already knew all the individual sounds but in the assessment, I found that they couldn’t blend them together.

In the Check I observed the way the students were articulating their sounds and quite often if students, if they weren’t sure of the sound, they might mumble it, which impacted the full reading of the word.

I also noticed a lot of students were able to self-correct on the word as I was not aware that they were doing in the classroom so that was really great in the Check for me to see that. And it was also good to see the students be able to break up the sounds and then put them back together.

I found the Check very easy to administer. It was a lot quicker than I imagined it to be and the students seemed really at easy when doing it.

The Check is really going to impact on my teaching as it has given me so insight into certain vowel diagraphs that a lot of my students didn’t know that I thought they had learnt from prior phonics lessons but unfortunately weren’t able to blend them together during the assessment.

The information I gathered from the Check, I’m now going to take it into my classroom and see the gaps that I found in the Check with the students sounds whether those are the same gaps in their writing.

And some of the things I saw students were capable of, I can now build on those within my classroom.

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