THREAD: I tried out the federal government’s phonics screening check for families with my prep daughter today, largely driven by curiousity about how she’s progressing in her reading given the long stint of home learning we’ve had in Victoria this year...

As I’ve written about, we deviated from the balanced-literacy script, teaching her synthetic phonics and using decodable books at home. This was due to my concerns that the “Just Right” readers didn’t correlate with what she was learning and were encouraging a guessing habit...

The phonics check for families consists of 20 words and she scored 15, maybe 16. Words that she struggled with = flute (she pronounced it flat), goat (got), yune (yun), poil (pole), thorn (with a voiceless ‘th’ as in ‘the’ but I’m divided as to whether this is a major issue)...

Those errors don’t surprise or concern me as neither the school nor I have explicitly taught the ‘oa’, ‘oi’ or ‘u_e’ digraphs. Pleasingly, she breezed through most of the words even the longer ones that I thought might trip her up such as ‘truck’,
‘queen’ and ‘shrubs’ ...

It’s been a useful exercise and put to rest some of those anxieties I’ve had about kiddo spending approx half her foundation year of school at home. I can see she is becoming more skilled in decoding words using her knowledge of the alphabetic code...

Obviously, becoming a skilled reader depends on more than just phonics skills. I still have some concerns about her fluency while reading books — she’s still quite slow — but her teacher is aware and working with her on that....

Doing the screening check took less than five minutes. My daughter enjoyed it and she wasn’t thrown by the fact that some of the words were made-up. Link to the check and other resources: https://literacyhub.edu.au/families/phonics-check-for-families.html