Failed phonics y1 phonics test & advanced reader

[Robindrama]

( I have another thread here but will post specific question as a separate one) any ideas will be much appreciated.

Ds in y1. Just had a parents evening. End of year prediction: reading above expectation, but will fail phonics test.
Question: how can that be possible?

School reading levels are 1-26, 26 free reader. End of y1 expected level is 17/18. DS is currently on level 20. Excellent reading and advanced comprehension.
Phonics tests results 23/40. Expected to fail the test. I will have a meeting with teachers shortly.

School they taught (and still do in many schools) children to memorise the words in the book (either cards or lists sent home) and once you knew them you got the book with those words then you got a new set of words. If you met a word you hadn't memorised you looked at the picture, not the word, and guessed what it might be from the picture. If that didn't help you looked at the first letter and guessed what might fit the sentence. It didn't really matter whether you were right or wrong because after all you were reading for meaning
Alternatively you could try Mr Rosens method which is lock the child in a room full of books and they will learn by osmosis.

Feenie "Portends" is a real word, not a made up word.

Might depend on the school confusion. I seem to have been taught more phonics than most people my age, but it was still 'mixed methods' in that there were a small number of 'sight' words on cards to take home and non-decodeable reading books. According to my mum, if we couldn't sound out a word we were just told it rather than encouraged to guess.

That seems to have been alongside a fairly comprehensive set of phonics workbooks in YrR and Yr1 and spelling lists organised by sound/spelling pattern in KS2.

Thanks - every time I typed a nonsense word the autocorrect changed it to a real one, just like the children on this thread. I missed that one!

Excentric? Don't know where to start with that one!

The phonics test has so many issues OP. I genuinely wouldn't be concerned if my kids' teacher had told me this.

The test is often unsuitable for sen kids because the silly alien pics simply throw them off...some kids don't read phonetically , they simply memorise the body of the word. I could go on!

The NC isn't a fit for all kids and that's okay. It annoys me when schools try to push a square peg into a round hole , and I happen to work in one!

"The test is often unsuitable for sen kids because the silly alien pics simply throw them off" then use the test without pictures
"some kids don't read phonetically , they simply memorise the body of the word." That's exactly why the check is needed ... because it's a very ineffective strategy

I agree it has issues. Firstly it includes real words. Secondly it seems to encourage teachers to think that children that have met the standard don't need further teaching. Which given the simplicity of the test is problematic.

The problem with the alien pics can, as mrz said be solved by simply covering up the pictures.

The % of children that can't learn to read through phonics is less than 1%. And the point of the screening check is to identify those children even though some of them may appear to be reading at a level considered appropriate for their age.

Rafa you can print off the check material without pictures using NCAtools once the test is live. That's what I do because the pictures are unnecessary

op, i was an advanced reader, and I failed the phonics test quite spectacularly. mainly, i couldn't really be arsed with all the made up nonsense, I knew they weren't words, and so didn't see the point.
i was also way beyond the sounding out stage when we took the test, and so i was just reading the words as they were, instead of grouped letters.

i wouldn't worry at all if i were you.

Simplysleepy are you ten years old?

Mrz Well, if she took the phonics check when it was first brought in, in 2012, I supposed she could be 11....

Rafals , what happens long term when children in that 1% are identified? I've never worked beyond early Ks2 so have no experience. Are they asked to retake beyond year 2?

I also wasn't aware teachers now had access to the resources without the pictures , that's a huge improvement!

Witchend above suggested, perhaps facetiously, that in 10 years "another study" will come out to reverse the verdict favouring phonics. What many people don't seem to realise is that there are literally hundreds of studies supporting the superiority of explicit phonics teaching over other methods, if your goal is to get as many children reading as possible. This is an area that has been intensively studied by reading research psychologists for 40 plus years, and the evidence keeps getting stronger. People like Michael Rosen are always very careful not to mention that.

Teachers have always had access to the phonics check materials without pictures it's not new.
Have you administered the check user?

The 1% are unlikely to have taken the phonics screening check as their needs will have been identified very early due to the severity of their global difficulties.

Mrz , the last time I did a phonics check was 2014 and I just used the resource pack I was given , I'm support staff and was checking my group prior to the test.

It's pleasing though as I sat in with one particular child for his check back then (suspected asd , SaL confirmed) and saw him just fixate on those bloody aliens and forget all I'd taught him!

I have a Q. (As mentioned before, we're not in UK but roughly follow NC. When it suits the schools!) My yr 1 ds can do the phonics test but I would say his phonics ability is still far behind his reading level. I'm assuming the school will carry on with phonics for some time yet and he'll catch up, but his instinct is still to guess long new words. How do I get him to take a step back and practise using his phonics skills? For example. Today he came across the word 'interrogated'. It was a joke on a babybel wrapper, the whole joke went over his head anyway so he wouldn't have noticed the meaning being incorrect until he asked me. He was reading quickly and guessed at 'ignored' or something similar. I stopped him and asked him to go slowly through the word and use his sounds. He found it annoying but gave it a couple of goes and got there in the end. So the knowledge is there he just doesn't know when to use it. If a word like that came up while reading a book I suspect he'd prefer to just ignore it and crack on with the rest of the story than come to find me and ask me (although he does do most of his reading out loud to me still. I'm finding it hard to find books that are at his reading level but not aimed at older kids so there is always son explaining to do) Is this something we could have avoided if his reading level and appetite for books hadn't been so far ahead of his phonics lessons at school? Am I being too laid back in assuming everything's great?

I must be missing something, I just can't see how you be can be sure that stoic must be decoded as stow-ick without somebody to tell you. Isn't that why you need special notation in the dictionary? Such as ˈstəʊɪk'. If I read the word for the first time I would probably pronounce it 'stoike'

If I read the word for the first time I would probably pronounce it 'stoike'

But surely you know that 'ic' doesn't make the same sound as 'ike'? I don't remember learning to read, but I do remember a teacher talking about how an "e' on the end of a word changes the way it's pronounced. (This was back in the old days, before Look and Say and Whole Word Recognition.)

You wouldn't pronounce 'picnic' as 'picnike', would you?

stoyk??

Heroic, fantastic, sarcastic, dramatic, elastic, terrific.

Like, Mike, bike, hike, strike, pike.

Chicken you're correct you don't know the correct pronunciation unless the word is in your vocabulary. Phonics isn't about pronunciation

User I've found lots of children are distracted by the pictures not just those with SEN. They want to chat about number of eyes or legs, hairstyle or sharp teeth. I've not found it to be an obstacle to decoding correctly.