Year 1 Phonics Screening Check - Information for parents and carers 

What is phonics? 

Phonics is the relationship between letters and sounds and is vital in learning to read. Some children struggle with learning to read so it is important that these children are identified quickly so teachers can plan for any specific support they may need. 

What is the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check? 

The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check is a short, quick assessment that tells teachers how your child is progressing in phonics. Your child will sit with Mrs Rebecca Neiberding (Inclusion Teacher) and will be asked to read 40 words aloud. These words include 20 real words and 20 nonsense words. The test normally takes a few minutes. If your child is struggling Rebecca will stop the check. The check is carefully designed not to be stressful for your child. 

Why use nonsense words? 

The assessment includes pseudo or nonsense words to see if the student is able to use their knowledge of blending to read a word rather than their memory of having seen that word before. 

More information  

If you have any further questions, please talk to Myself or Rebecca Neiberding (Inclusion Teacher).

High Impact Teaching Practices

On Wednesday, Toni from COGLearn came to work with a number of our teachers on the implementation of High Impact Teaching Practices. I have written in past newsletters about the implementation of daily review across the school. We are continuing to implement and refine daily review as a high impact teaching practice across the school. 

A daily review is a short session in which students recall previously learned content.

Picture yourself in your high school chemistry class. Chemistry is a complex, highly technical subject in which you learn a lot of new words and concepts that you have never seen before. One day you might learn about balancing chemical formulas and the next you might have to apply that concept to a more complex problem.

Now imagine that you learned each topic in chemistry only once. Your teacher introduced it, taught it, and you practiced and then never saw it again until the test. If that sounds stressful, then you probably already understand the need for a daily review. During a daily review, students and their teacher spend a short amount of time recalling what they have previously learned. This process helps learning move into a student's long term memory. 

At St John's our daily reviews are through a short teacher powerpoint presentation. A short teacher presentation includes the most important information that students need to recall.

Alongside the daily review, we have been working with Toni on the implementation and delivery of our explicit teaching lessons across the school. 

Explicit teaching practices, including the effective use of feedback, are key elements of effective teaching. Such practices ensure that students have a clear understanding of why they are learning something, how it connects to what they already know, what is expected of them, and how to do it (explicit teaching). They also ensure that students are given opportunities to ask questions and get clear feedback about their performance against learning outcomes (effective feedback).

Explicit teaching is an important teaching process, which involves a series of steps whereby the teacher:

• decides the learning intentions and success criteria
• makes the intentions and criteria transparent to students
• evaluates if they understand what they have been told by checking for understanding
• retells students what they have been told by tying it all together with closure and independent practice (NSW Government and The Learning Bar, 2021).