Learning and Teaching

Year 1 Phonics Check

What is phonics?

Phonics is a way of teaching students to read and spell words. It teaches students to connect sounds with letters or groups of letters.

Why is phonics important?

Phonics is an important part of learning to read and write in English. Children need to learn the sounds that letters and letter groups make and how to blend them to read words. Children then use this knowledge to ‘decode’ new words that they come across. Phonics helps children read and write in Standard Australian English. It supports those who speak another language, use a dialect, or have diverse learning needs.

What is the Year 1 Phonics Check?

The Year 1 Phonics Check (the Check) is a short assessment. It shows teachers how your child is learning phonics. It helps teachers understand your child's phonics skills and plan what to teach next. The Check assesses how your child reads English words with different letter combinations. The teacher will ask your child to read aloud 40 words. Twenty of these words will be real words and 20 will be made-up words. They show teachers how well children are using their knowledge of phonics to read words. A score in the range of 28 to 40 demonstrates that students are ‘at or above expected level’, a score in the range of 0 to 27 demonstrates that students are ‘below expected level’. If the Check shows your child is below the expected level, teachers decide the best ways to help them learn.

The Check is completed by all Year 1 students (other than those unable to complete the assessment), during Weeks 4 to 6 of Term 3. Generally, the Check takes 5 to 7 minutes and is designed to be straightforward and not stressful.

How does the Phonics Check work?

• Your child will sit with a teacher they know and be asked to read up to 40 words aloud.

• These words are a mix of real words and made-up words (sometimes called 'pseudo words', 'non-words' or 'nonsense words').

• Your child may have read some of the words before, while others, like the made-up words will be completely new.

What words are in the Phonics Check?

The Phonics Check includes a mix of real words and non-words. The teacher will tell your child before the Phonics Check that there will be made-up words that they will not have seen before. Children might be familiar with this because many schools already use non-words when they teach phonics.

Non-words are important to include because words such as ‘vap' or ‘jound' are new to all children. Children cannot read the pseudo words by using their memory or vocabulary; they have to use their decoding skills. This is a fair way to assess their ability to decode.

The Phonics Check helps your child's teacher and the school to understand your child's decoding strengths and areas to work on. Teachers and schools can then use this information to inform their teaching program. 

Taken from https://www.vic.gov.au/victorian-year-1-phonics-check  and https://www.literacyhub.edu.au/for-families/what-is-the-year-1-phonics-check/ 

Deborah Courtney

(Director of Learning and Teaching)