Y1 phonics check

[piellabakewell]

You can see it in action here so you know what we are putting them through!

I agree about the media furor. damned if you damned if you dont.

mrz for similar, read virtually identical. Not surprisingly......:

Also (from the TES):
'The National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) is unhappy that synthetic phonics guru Ruth Miskin - whose company sells training courses to schools - is the only primary literacy expert on the Government-appointed advisory committee.

Its unease is compounded by the fact the only two serving primary heads on the committee are self-proclaimed users of Ms Miskin's synthetic phonics reading scheme - Read Write Inc.'

rightly or wrongly, I played the video clip on silent to DD (almost 5) and told her it was a game, just like our Mr Thorne app.
She got them all right....
So I guess school have done a good job in teaching her phonics.
Shame their book stock and approach to actual reading is shite not up to scratch

I only asked, festi, because for the first 2 or 3 years it is quite easy for children to appear to be really good readers when all they are really doing is memorising whole words or a whole text (you know, the child that can 'read' a whole book accurately with its eyes shut ). Then they fall behind as texts become more complex and they run out of memory for whole words.

I'm not saying that this is the case with the children you are familiar with, but it does happen and this is one of the things that the Check should identify.

No it won't Maizie. They're the children who will romp through it.

mind you the video corrupted at splok so not sure what came after...

Ruth Miskin - whose company sells training courses to schools

Well, if they can't get their facts right in this respect xcan they be trusted in others?

Ruth Miskin doesn't have a company. She sold her (previously self published out of a garage, from the looks of it) programme to OUP about 5 years ago. She trains for them. Who better than the programme developer to train on 'her' programme? Sue Lloyd does lots of Jolly Phonics training. No-body makes snide comments about her.

Oh blast! Just saw the unecessary x as I pressed 'post'

No it won't Maizie. They're the children who will romp through it.

What, mumblessmum? Even the nonsense words?

Ruth Miskin runs a training company:

www.ruthmiskinliteracy.com/

Yes, it all depends on their ability to blend the sounds to make a 'realistic' English word. All they have to do is use their phonics knowledge to build the words, blend them and say them.
We tried it out with about 10 Y1s and they were fine. It was just time consuming.

I would say the children I talked about decode very well, dds school do provide a wide variety or reading books from different schemes so it is not all the predicted text of for instnace the magic key set. the majority of y1s in my dds mixed y1 2 class are reading a variety of texts from quite a high reading band.

I do apologise, mm. I was under the impression that she trained on behalf of OUP. I didn't realise she was still running a separate company.

Yes, it all depends on their ability to blend the sounds to make a 'realistic' English word. All they have to do is use their phonics knowledge to build the words, blend them and say them.

I think I was at cross purposes with you. I assume that if they can read the nonsense words accurately without sounding and blending aloud that would be evidence that they can decode and blend. It would be any who couldn't do that who would be a worry.

I imagine that a child who could whizz through the nonsense words correctly without sounding out and blending aloud wouldn't be a 'whole word' reader, a guesser or a memoriser...

my dd seems to have gone from blending to whole word reading, my uneducated thoughts on this was because she now understands the rules of phonix so to speak. she dose not seem to sound out and blend unfamiliar words anymore. so I would doubt she would attemp to sound out and blend the nonsense words she would probably either just read them as a whole word or say the letter names out loud then the word. she was sounding out and decoding in YR so she did learn phonix but does not follow the sound blending anymore, she would still pass the test because although she was not disaplying the blending she would show she has a good comprehension of sound blens I assume.

I may be horribly wrong, but I believe that all children use phonics as the basis of their reading, it's just that some internalise the patterns more quickly so they just read 'naturally'. As adults we also 'sound' unfamiliar words out.

A good reader looking at 'blurp' will still be breaking the word up into its component sounds - they will just doing it quickly! I have to read 'blurp' or 'sweck' using phonics!

If (when?) the results of the phonics check are analysed, it will highlight (for example) a child who says b-l-u-p for blurp, but correctly reads slerp for slerp, and it will inform the teacher that he hasn't yet learnt to read the phonic equivalent of the 'er' sound.

Personally, I think the 'phonics check' is a (political) compromise to the regular, half-termly assessment that takes place in RWI. In RWI, in order to get to the next group a child has to read a mixture of:
*focus sounds (not in words)
*real words containing the focus sounds
*made-up words containing the focus sounds
So, for instance, to get to group B, a child has to read all letter sounds; to get to group C, they have to read sh, ch, can, tin, fup, bup (for instance) and so on, to group J when all 44 sounds will have been learnt and tested.

This phonics check does that in a kind of non-specific, half-hearted way, but it should do its job and highlight the children who need intervention.

festi if she's reading the word, she's 'displaying the blending'. That's all they've got to do - read 40 words.

Personally I'm impressed that the government has got any primary literacy representatives on the advisory committee.
www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/curriculum/nationalcurriculum/a0075393/national-curriculum-review-advisory-committee-pen-pictures

mumblesmum evidence coming from brain imaging research suggests that you are correct. The 10 year research shows that good readers rapidly read sound by sound ... Basically this research seems to be saying that the brain learns to read the same way it learns to talk, one sound at a time. When babies first learn to talk they may slowly say one sound at a time. Once they get the hang of it, they speed up. Our brain becomes adept at processing and our experience is that of hearing words but actually our brain is processing sounds (phonemes) and putting them together so we hear words. When we read the same process is in operation. Our brain is processing one sound at a time but we perceive it as a whole word. In good readers, the process is so fast it appears that they are reading whole words but in fact they are converting the letters on the written page into sounds. The brain then recognizes groups of sounds as words.

My ds3 is only just coming to the end of phase 3, if he does well with the test will he be pushed forward a bit. In his school I feel the progress is slow, he's read every book in each set of phase 3 it seems. He's bored of books and reading (such a shame) I worry he is so behind already and hope he does well and this will be an opportunity to show them what he can do.

I haven't read this whole thread but I have watched the video and just wanted to join in with a few comments.

First of all, I am suprised how lacking in fluency many of these children were when reading quite everyday real words. I wondered how normal this was or if many of the children were picked because of this.

Secondly I noticed some oddities with the nonsense words.

Emp a child was marked wroing for a bit of a pause while other pausey children in the video were marked correct.

Doy a child sounded each letter d-o-y, but got the right pronunciation, so that was correct.

Vead a child was marked wrong for reading the e and a as separate sounds but this happens in English eg create, seance.

Scrope a child read as 'scrop' which was apparently wrong. Would this not mean that the correct pronunciation of the real word 'gone' was also wrong?

Scrope a child read as scropee. Presumably the compilers think the correct pronunciation of the girl's name Penelope is also wrong.

Roopt does not look like a plausible English spelling. It does, however, look like a plausible Dutch word and would be pronounced like the English word 'roped'. This made me wonder if other nonsense words could be genuine words in other languages; has anyone considered bilingual children.

I thought that there were a few questionable decisions, too, CecilyP but, interestingly, we don't appear to have heard the same thing in some cases, so I wonder if it sounded slightly different to the check administrator too? For example, I heard the 'vead' word read as 'vade', where you hear 've-ade'.

To be quite honest, I think that if a child only makes one or two errors on the nonsense words they would still be well within the standard. If they made 6 or 7, after having got all the 'real' words correct, it would be real cause for concern.

wrt 'roopt', how many bi-lingual children can 'read' both their languages at age 6?

The Assessment and Reporting Arrangements for the test says

Those who may need access arrangements include children:

who are learning English as a second language and who have a limited knowledge of English. It should be noted most children who are learning English as a second language will be able to access the phonics screening check.

maizieD, I take your point about children not being fully literate in 2 languages at 6. I was thinking more of a test nonsense word being something really common in the other language, even the name of a product, or something that appears on hoardings in the other country.

mrz, I really wasn't thinking of children with limited knowledge of English. I was thinking of children who speak perfectly good English and, because of family, have some knowledge of another language including regular visits to the country where that language is spoken, written and displayed.

Apparently the test has been carefully checked to ensure there are no words which are actual words in other languages - so says the DM, anyway.