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.

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.

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.

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.

jackjack, you are joking, aren't you?

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.

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!).

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.

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.