Welcome to our phonics test site. With the new emphasis on phonics in the UK we hope to provide you with information and advice about testing phonics ability.
The Government has finished consulting on the detail of the new Year 1 National Check and these are now implemented and are being carried out in the UK in 2012. Parents will be informed if their child has met the standard and how that compares with their peers.
A lot of children learn to read at school by using phonics. This is the method by which words are broken down into their sounds and children learn the sounds in order to work out how to break down each word and sound it out. They then put the sounds back together to work out how to pronounce the word. So by using this method your child will be able to learn how to read.
If you want to help your child at home, you will need to understand the reading methods that they use at school. If the school doesn’t help you with this, there are many sites online that will be able to teach you about phonics. The good thing about this method is that all schools teach the phonemes in the same order, so whatever site you look at and use to help your child, you know it will be doing things the same way as the school will be. There will be plenty of fun games to use to help your child learn, and this is the best way of engaging them and keeping them interested in their learning.
In order to know how well your child is doing with their reading at school you will need to have some method for testing which sounds they know and therefore how advanced their reading skills are. This will help you to choose exercises which are suited to the reading level that they are at. In order to do this you can’t give them a normal reading rest as this only tests their knowledge of words, it is a phonics test that they will need. From this assessment you will be able to find out which sounds they are struggling with and be able to help them with those.
If you are a parent of a young child who is learning to read you are likely to want to help them as much as you can at home. You may want to give them help before they start school so that they can get a head start, or you may want to give them support at home when they are learning to read. Most schools teach children to read using the phonics method of reading. This method is always taught in the same way in school. This means that even if you have had no contact with the school you will be able to support your child’s learning at home by looking at the extensive books and web sites that cover this subject. However, before you start with this you will need to know what level of reading your child is at.
Even children who don’t appear to be reading well may still have a good knowledge of phonics, so in order to find out where to start the support at home you will need to find out what level they are at. There are web sites out there which deal with testing phoneme knowledge so that you can find out how well your child is doing with their reading and you will know what support they need from you at home.
Whether your child is doing really well with their reading, or struggling with what they are learning at home, if you find a way of testing phoneme knowledge you will be able to find out exactly how to help them and what they need to be doing. You can then find fun activities to do with them at home to give them all the help that they will need to help them do really well with their learning.
Phonics can be difficult as there are so many different rules, due to the complexity of the English language, but schools try to teach children in exciting and interesting ways, using games, songs and puzzles to help them learn and make it feel like fun. If you can do this at home too then it will make it seem to the child that they are playing rather than learning. There are some early words that don’t follow any of the phonics rules and just need to be learned (such as the, I, come, going and be). It helps the child a lot if this can be done at home. You can play lots of games with the words to try and help them to learn them such as snap, lotto and using flash cards. It helps children a lot if they have rewards for good learning, so make a reward chart and give them a sticker on it every time they do good work and let them save up stickers to make a big present, or praise them each time they do work hard with a small gift or even a big hug and a long story at bedtime.
Phonics gives you all the skills you need to be able to read new words. If a child sees a word that they have never seen before they can try to work out what it says with confidence and having a set of rules they can use to help them work it out. This means that they can quickly become a really strong reader and pass a phonics test, and the skills they learn as a child can be applied to new words all through their life.