Informal Assessment

Build-a-word Activity

This is activity is a great hands-on, informal assessment for phonics. It’s engaging, interactive, and gives you quick insight into what a child knows about sounds and spelling patterns. The activity can also be adjusted to the teacher's preference (individual sounds or syllables). "Build-a-Word" activity has magnetic letters or letter tiles. Using the magnetic letters or tiles makes the activity feel like play, which helps students stay motivated and focused. As children build words, the teacher can gain valuable insight into their phonics skills. It allows for immediate feedback and can be easily adapted to different skill levels, making it ideal for small groups or one-on-one instruction. This type of assessment supports various learning styles, especially for students who benefit from visual and tactile learning experiences.

How to do it:

Introduce the Activity
Tell the child you’ll say a word, and they’ll use the letter pieces to build it.

Say the Word Aloud
Choose one word at a time. Say it clearly and slowly. You can also use it in a sentence for context.

Child Builds the Word
Let the child build the word using the letters. Watch how they sound it out and choose letters—this shows you what phonics patterns they’re applying.

Optional Extension
Ask them to swap one letter to make a new word (e.g., change cat to cap) to assess phoneme manipulation.

Observe and Take Notes
Look for: Sound-letter matching, the use of blends/digraphs, their understanding of vowel patterns, and self-corrections

The skills are we assessing:

Phonemic awareness – recognizing and manipulating individual sounds in words

Sound-letter correspondence – matching sounds to the correct letters

Blending – combining individual sounds to form whole words

Segmenting – breaking words into individual sounds or syllables

Spelling patterns – applying common phonics rules such as CVC words, digraphs (sh, th, ch), blends (st, bl, tr), and vowel teams (ai, ea, oa)

Word families and rhyming patterns – recognizing and building words with similar endings (e.g., -at, -ing)

Decoding – using knowledge of phonics to read and build new words

Phoneme manipulation – changing, adding, or removing sounds to make new words (e.g., change cat to cap)

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