Tanya If you want to know more about quick phonics assessments and how to pinpoint the students’ reading difficulty to guide your teaching and form small group interventions, then read on!
Words are broken down into individual phonemes or sounds, which you should teach in a sequential order for students to learn to read. There are many suggested scope and sequences; here is a free one. With this in mind, identifying which sounds the students do not know, can help the resource teacher pinpoint the difficulty and form small intervention groups.
Keep in mind, reading is comprised of many elements that fall under language comprehension and word recognition. We will focus on the word recognition part; specifically the phonological awareness. Some learners may have excellent decoding skills, but not understand what they are reading. It is important to consider all areas when creating resource groups. To learn more about this click here.
Assessing Phonics
If you suspect a phonics difficulty for your student, ensure the student can identify all of the sounds in a word when given orally. Next, the student will learn to associate a sound to a letter or a phoneme to a grapheme. Here are some assessments to help pinpoint the specific sounds the student should work on.
- Assessing letter sounds (Free)
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Being a resource teacher, I am always trying to maximize my time and provide the rest of the team data to help the student as well. For this reason, the above assessments also provide a personalized letter available to give to parents. By looking at this data, the parents can review the specific sounds the child struggles with.
Each parent letter suggests activities to help them teach the sound to their child at home. Examples and tools are provided as well.
It is important to assess letter sound knowledge, short and long vowel sounds and digraphs. Testing consonant blends can tell you if a child can blend two or more sounds together.
Once I know the difficulties each students has in regards to phonological awareness, I make form my groups and create an appropriate intervention. Note that groups are flexible and change when a child has mastered that skill. This is a tier 2 intervention in RTI.
Happy assessing!
