Pirates, Mermaids and the Beach

At this point in the year we complete our assessments of the children's phonic knowledge; and the record is then passed on to their Year 1 teacher, so that they can carry on their learning.

During their first year in school, the children have had daily phonics lessons.  They have been exposed to all the sounds in Phase 2 and Phase 3 and these are the sounds that we assess them against.

The link below to Phonics Play.co.uk has a number of phonics games for your child to practice. On Buried Treasure you will find all of the Phase 2 and 3 phonemes that your child has been exposed to. It a marvellous tool for checking your child's phonic knowledge, as it generates a good number of words with a particular phoneme for your child to practice segmenting and blending to read.  Some words are real, some are not, in order that your child can extend their vocabulary.  The real words are dragged into the treasure chest, whereas the others are dragged to the dustbin.

In the Year 1 Statutory Phonics Assessment your child is required to read both real and not real words, as the test is checking on their ability to "decode" words, not read for meaning.

If your child can continue to have regular practice at decoding words containing the phonemes in Phases 2 and 3, they will be more than ready for Year 1.

The link to the Tricky Words Songs, Phases 2 and 3 are below. These are also very useful for Year 1 learning, particularly, if your child can both read and write them.  Practicing super sentence making orally with them is invaluable, especially if your child has an awareness of beginning a sentence with a capital letter, ending with a full stop and putting finger spaces in between each word.  As you can see, it is a lot to remember and regular practice certainly does make progress.