KS1 teachers - what do you do with your able readers during phonics sessions?

[dogtanianandthe3muskehounds]

So, I'm fairly new to Year 2. My class started the year with a fairly poor grasp of phonics so we are doing daily sessions following the Letters and Sounds programme. It's all going well, but I have a small group of children (4 or 5) who are now reading more or less fluently and not benefiting from further phonics practice. I was just wondering how other teachers use this time to get them to do something productive.

[jackjacksmummy]

Watching because I need challenges for my highers in year 1 who also grasped all phases. My next step with them will be endless practice tests with plenty of alien words and activities for phonics screening in June.

[melonribena]

I have some capable year 2 children. In the phonics session when others are doing phonics, they would do some reading comprehension work or I moved the focus onto writing, as that was what the children needed.
We would do sentence work, sentence starters, complex sentences, that kind of thing.

[melonribena]

I have some capable year 2 children. In the phonics session when others are doing phonics, they would do some reading comprehension work or I moved the focus onto writing, as that was what the children needed.
We would do sentence work, sentence starters, complex sentences, that kind of thing.

[Asleeponasunbeam]

jackjack, you are joking, aren't you?

[toomuchicecream]

We use the phonics assessments on phonicsplay. Once a child has got 85% on the test they are deemed to have finished that phase and be ready for the next one. The phase 5 test has some quite tricky words to spell and unless a child is very bright & good at phonics, my TA and I have found the most reliable way to get a child through the test is sent those spelling words as homework. It's a complete balls-ache to do the assessments, especially as I'm expected to do them every 6 weeks (completely and utterly pointless), but it does show up interesting gaps which I then use in future planning.

I've got 3/4 of my year 2 pupils now on phase 6 phonics - lots about past tense and adding suffixes. However, as the spring term goes on I incorporate more practice for the reading SATS paper (by doing comprehension from different books - not past papers - but they need some experience of writing down answers) and also punctuation work etc like melonribena says. Basically all the bits and pieces I notice are missing from their writing but are needed for high level 2/level 3 writing, but because I've got a mixed age class I don't want to do in whole class English lessons with year 1 sitting there. This term it will include commas in lists, apostrophes for contractions and speech punctuation.

My TA takes the year 2 children for phase 6 phonics so I can concentrate on teaching phase 5 phonics to the year 1s. If you don't have a TA you could send your most able off with, do you have access to tablets or laptops? There are some good phonics apps/games online - either for your least able so you can teach the top ones or vice versa.

[dogtanianandthe3muskehounds]

Thanks for the ideas. I will definitely do some reading comprehension. School has rubbish ICT resources - 1 desktop available! My TA is a bit too inexperienced to be teaching the phase 6 stuff unfortunately, but hopefully I'll find some time to give her a bit of training. The phonicsplay assessments sound better than my hard copy Letters and Sounds assessments (also a total pain to complete!).

[jackjacksmummy]

Of course I am - they're my highers, they'll get through it with ease. They're going into a group with some others of similar ability from the other year 1 classes and doing some reading comprehension and moving onto phase 6 whilst I'm covering phases 4/5 with the rest of the class.

[jackjacksmummy]

I already having nightmares about phonics screening test that's all - probably because we've recently changed over from read, write inc to letters and sounds.