The phonics screening check
English · Key Stage 1 · The School
What the check is
In Year 1 in England, every pupil reads forty words aloud to their teacher. Twenty are real words. Twenty are made-up ones. It takes a few minutes. There is no time limit. It is not an exam to be feared. It is a check on whether decoding works yet.
Why half the words are nonsense
A child can memorise the SHAPE of a hundred common words. Then they look like a reader without being able to decode. Made-up words like spron or glimp cannot have been memorised. So the only way through is to sound out and blend. That is exactly the skill the check exists to measure.
Sound it, blend it, say it
Work left to right. Say each sound in turn. Then run them together and say the whole word. S-p-r-o-n. Spron. Do not stop after the first two sounds. And do not guess from the first letter. The sounds are the road. Guessing is a shortcut, and it leads somewhere else.
Two letters can make one sound
The traps are the digraphs and trigraphs: sh, ch, th, ck, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air. Take the word chom. The ch is one sound, not two. So the word has three sounds, not four. Spot these before you start. That is the difference between blending smoothly and getting stuck.