Phonics

This should be administered with individual children. You will need the teacher’s manual and the child’s workbook. Do not administer the whole screening tool in one sitting. Stop assessing after three mistakes. This will show the instructional level. Grouping by decoding and encoding ability is more useful than by reading level as children with a high level of reading fluency and accuracy may still be relying on ‘cues’ and guess work rather than decoding ability. This can lead to problems at a later stage.

1 mistake – room for error 2 mistakes – instructional level 3 mistakes – frustration level

Stop assessing at three mistakes in total. If you have to remedy more than three mistakes, then it will take longer for the child to master them and will lead to frustration. You may need to work on revising more than one group of letters. Greyed out areas are nonsense words. If a child gives you a possible alternate phoneme or grapheme, accept it. e.g. gh = /f/,

This is a copy of the record sheet for children.