What are you doing to prepare for the phonics test?

[Busymumto3dc]

As it says really!

Yep that is the obvious solution mrz. But she's stubborn and she's reading silently to herself, so it's hard to police! To rephrase: keen and able readers are likely to push themselves beyond their comfort zone, which means they are likely to be doing what lots of teachers on this thread say is a cardinal sin, namely guessing from context and skipping hard words because they are wanting to get to the next bit quickly! To me, I guess, this seems acceptable since they are gaining other things from reading difficult books, namely reading enjoyment and speed/fluency. Otherwise, the answer seems to be that you push them back to stuff they can read easily but will bore them. But maybe I just leave that problem to her teachers, and let her read whatever takes her fancy at home!

Context is great for working out the meaning of unfamiliar words but not great for accurately reading but sometimes we all skip difficult names in novels nothing is lost in understanding and it doesn't matter too much but in other situations it's vital that we read accurately and have the skills to do so. Silent reading helps us to read quickly but it shouldn't be at the price of lost accuracy so worthwhile occassionally keeping up reading out loud.

If she's skipping over words because she can't read them or be bothered to read them, then the last thing she is doing is gaining fluency though. Fluency means reading every word on the page quickly and accurately. She's doing the opposite of that.

It might not be a problem if it's one book and she's reading other stuff that isn't too difficult for her and that you are making her read properly. But if it's the only book she's reading at the moment, then she is deskilling herself and runs the risk of plateauing in the future. If she really wants to read that book cold you do something like reading alternate pages, chapters with her.

Yes point taken. The problem is not decoding - she is pretty much 100% accurate with that. It's understanding new vocab and parsing complicated sentence construction. I keep saying to her that phonics is the easy bit, now the really interesting challenge begins!
Sorry for thread hijack!

I don't know anything about this check.

Do parents get told results or is it just for the school's records?

I do see where you are coming from, zoe. Some precocious readers will read anything and everything put in front of them whether they understand it or not. I was the same. I wouldn't want to discourage that at all.

It's just a good idea to make sure that's not leading to bad habits and that she keeps up her decoding skills. IIRC I always had to have a 'school' book from the class library to read at home and a group reading book that we read in school, once we'd finished the scheme. Both of which were more at my level. It probably won't mean going back as far as Biff and Chip. Might something like that work, then if you are listening to her read it you can talk about new vocab as it comes up.

They have to tell you whether your child reached the required standard. Not sure whether they have to tell you the sore.

Fingers - my understanding is that the score will be printed in DD's (yr1) school report.

Whether it is mandatory (the actual score) I don't know, but my DC school have always (well, since phonics check has been in place) report XX/40 & then "required standard" next to it.

That's helpful rafa, thanks. Unfortunately it's the school books that are creating problems in this respect. Because she's definitely past the scheme books (only go to white/lime in her school) she just gets sent upstairs to the yr 3-5 'chapter book' bookcases to choose for herself (and it took us three weeks to even get to this point, because her teacher didn't know the bookcases had been moved upstairs!!.). These are quite often quite unsuitable in content for a 6yo as well as much too advanced in terms of reading. I had another thread on here which gave loads of useful suggestions, so I suspect the answer is to ignore the school books altogether. Annoying, it feels like the school have slightly discharged their responsibility towards her in reading terms. She is probably the best reader in her class, but hardly a complete outlier!

Reporting the actual score is a change which happened last year. Schools have to report the score and 'WA' - working at or 'WT' - working towards.

Not that ds's school took any notice. The once is in the KS1 ARA, which I am beginning to realise no one ever reads.