S5 E3 - Quick Phonics Assessment to Start the Year

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Welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn. I'm so pleased to welcome you to this episode recorded here in Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people.

We all know that it's important to choose phonics content that is targeted to student need, but how can you do this at the start of the year without taking weeks to gather data? Many schools have adopted a phonics program and are using the phonics assessment that comes with that. They use the assessment at the beginning of the year, the end of the year and, hopefully, at many points in between to evaluate the impact of instruction. Even if your school is in this position and you enter the new school year with a spreadsheet of data about where students are up to at the end of the previous year, you may still want to spend a little time doing some simple check-in assessment. After all, the most effective way to get a handle on where your class is sitting is to do some assessment yourself. Nothing beats watching students respond in real time.

The other thing to consider is that data might indicate what lessons covered right at the end of the previous school year, rather than what students have consolidated into their long-term memory. It's entirely possible for students to have been introduced to new phoneme-grapheme correspondences in weeks six, seven or eight of term four of the previous year, but not have consolidated that new learning. Launching straight into new content risks creating a gap in the student's learning. So, whether you have established phonics data for your class or not, it's worth taking some time to conduct a simple check-in about phonics knowledge with your class at the start of the year, regardless of the grade you're teaching.

This all sounds good, but I can practically hear you saying, but Jocelyn, where am I supposed to find time for all that assessment? The good news is that for a simple check-in, you don't have to sit every child down one by one and assess them. Today I'm sharing a simple method of getting a roundabout sense of where your class is sitting in their phonics knowledge. From there you can do further investigation to find out precisely what different children need.

Steps to Follow

Let's dive into the steps that you can follow and some of the considerations around this.

Number One

Make sure that you have enough whiteboards and working markers for each child, along with something for them to rub their board off with. If that's a tissue or a paper towel, then great. If you don't have enough whiteboards, really good quality plastic sleeves with a piece of paper inside them on a clipboard work well too. You'll also need the scope and sequence document for your school's phonics program. If you're a Resource Room member or you use Reading Success in Action as your phonics program, you can find that information on the Resource Room site or in your decoding books. But every systematic synthetic phonics program has this information so grab what your school is already using and get ready to check in.

Number Two

Determine the phonics knowledge that your students should have learned in the year before they reached your classroom. If you're teaching Year One, that's the basic code. If you are teaching Year Two, that's the complex code. If you are teaching Upper Primary, Year Three to Six, that's the whole code, including multiple spellings of various phonemes or sounds. Your starting point for instruction and this check-in will depend on your student's age and what you know about them. So just decide on the starting point that makes sense to you and have an educated guess. If after the first few questions, most students know all of it, well, you can move ahead. If most students are weak in the knowledge, you can go back. Don't try to test the whole code at once, though. Break up what you want to know into small sections and check in on them in manageable chunks, say five graphemes or phonemes per day. This ensures that you don't tire your students out and it allows you to make the analysis of what you find much more manageable. It's so much easier to check in on five bits of information for your class than it is to be overwhelmed with 30 or 40.

The Check-In

To conduct the check-in, sit all of your students either at desks or on the mat, or a combination of these, but place them far enough away from each other that they can't copy. The other ways you can limit copying is to sit students who you know need extra support closest to you and keep the pace of the expected response snappy. So if you give the children 20 seconds between each question, then they're going to rub things out and second guess themselves and look at what everyone else is doing. So make the assessment, or the check-in, go quite quickly. If you are checking in on the basic code, say the phonemes one at a time, the sounds, and have students write the grapheme.

So you'll say write down /b/. Do not review grapheme cards before you do this check-in, you want to know what the students have embedded into their long-term memory. This is very much a cold task, because if they know it, they know it. No amount of school holidays or being a bit distracted is going to prevent them from knowing it. Have the students write across the board and then show you their boards, so they'll have five graphemes, hopefully, written on their board. It's a really good idea, just for your own knowledge, to take a video of this check-in and watch it back later so that you can see who is and isn't trying to copy from their peers. Kids are terrific at fudging these sorts of assessments. Now, when you take the video, have the camera next to you so that you can capture the class from the front rather than from the back. Just prop an iPad up at the front and the students won't know. Don't have the screen so that they can see themselves, they will be highly distracted, but put it so that the screen's facing away from them and all will be well.

When they have written their graphemes, have the students show you their board and take a photo of the entire class. You can then see in one snapshot who does and doesn't have the code. To record this information, simply create a table and tick the box if the student has it, or leave it blank if they don't. Resource Room members have access to a spreadsheet where you can enter a one or a zero and the results will be colour-coded for you.

Next, if you are checking in beyond the basic code, things are a little different. Rather than saying write /b/, you will say, "Write down all of the ways you know how to spell the sound /a/". This is much more open-ended and gives you a really good idea of what students know. Some students will write one grapheme, others will write five, some will write five correct graphemes and others will write two and the other three are kind of just made up. If you say, "Write down /a/ as in play", there's a good chance that the student will have memorised that common word and then analyse it to get the right answer.

While analogy is a valid spelling strategy, it's not what we want for this. For this, we want to know about the student's phonics knowledge. The reason I'm suggesting that you focus on recall rather than recognition is that if the student can recall and write, they really know the content. If they can't, then their knowledge is incomplete. It's not enough for the students just to recognise the grapheme and say the correct phoneme. In order for them to spell, they need to be able to recall this information to use it. This is also an opportunity to check in on handwriting and stroke order, which must be automatic for strong writing to occur.

Once you've determined who can and cannot recall graphemes, you'll then decide on which students need a check-in for recognising. If you're a teacher in an upper primary classroom, this will likely be a small number of children who are at significant risk of difficulty. But be prepared that you'll need to do the recognition or reading part with any student who has significant difficulties with the recall task. In the early years, it's anyone who didn't know what you would expect them to know by that point in their schooling. The reason you want to do this is that it will help you better understand which correspondences have to be re-taught from scratch and which correspondences can just be focused on in the daily review to consolidate them.

As a rough guide, if the students can automatically and confidently recognise the grapheme but they're wobbly on the recall, you don't need to reteach that grapheme. Just pay special attention to those correspondences in daily review and make sure that you focus on recall rather than recognition. They can already recognise, we want them thinking about the phoneme, thinking about the grapheme and writing it down automatically. If they can't recognise or recall confidently, the graphemes will need to be taught again, with appropriate follow-up for consolidation.

It Won't Take Too Long

This whole process of checking in for phonics will likely take you about two weeks all up. A week to do the recall check-in with just a few graphemes a day, and a week to do further assessment with students who needed it. For some students they will need the whole thing assessed for reading. Others will need only a few phonemes or graphemes checked in on. However, don't wait for week three before you begin to do some consolidation on content the students should have known but didn't. From the first day of the recall task with whiteboards, you can start reviewing and rehearsing with the graphemes students didn't know. This will mean that you won't waste the first two weeks of school, but also, you'll be able to see which students are able to quickly get back on track with their phonics learning with just a bit of reminding, and which students will need higher intensity instruction. All of this impacts and informs your approach to phonics instruction.

This episode isn't about how to pace and organise phonics instruction in your main teaching. For that you can have a listen to Season 3, Episode 15, Four Points to Consider when Pacing Phonics Instruction. You might also like to search my website, jocelynseamereducation.com for the term "phonics". There are a range of blog posts and podcasts with useful information about early reading instruction, but also in catch-up for the three to six space.

And if you are listening to this at the time of recording, you might like to join me for the Reading Success in the Early Primary Years Teach Along that begins in February. This 12-week course will equip you and your team with lots of practical know-how about reading instruction in the first three years of school. It's designed to be general enough in nature so that you can get oodles of value regardless of the phonics program you use in your school, but it's specific enough to enable you to take real action to get every child reading. If you're interested in learning more about this course, visit jocelynseamereducation.com/reading success.

As you prepare for the new school year, remember, the best instruction focuses on student need, not what a program says you should be focusing on each week. Yes, we want to work with our phonics programs with fidelity, but that doesn't have to come at the expense of targeted instruction that meets students at precisely the point they need for strong learning. We know that this gets you the best outcomes.

That's all from me this week. Until next time, happy teaching everyone. Bye.

Show Notes:

S3 Ep15 - Four Points to Consider When Pacing Phonics Instruction

Reading Success in the Early Primary Years Teach Along

Ready for a practical roadmap to help you focus on practices and principles of instruction, not programs? Click here to find out more.