Do You Need New Phonics Assessments?

Whether you’re starting the school year like many of our colleagues in the United States or mid-year or coming back from a break, you need phonics assessments to determine what students know and where they need additional instruction, practice, and support. 

Many phonics games and activities can be used as informal phonics assessments to check skills. Activities like draw and match, find the words, missing sounds, say and trace, jumbled sentences, tap it, map it, zap it, and fluency boards, that you might use in your literacy/phonics station or send home for homework can be adapted to check students’ progress. 

But sometimes you need something more formal and structured. A phonics assessment program fills that need. 

Create your phonics assessments program

You can create your own phonics assessments. You’ll want to include: 

• A score sheet to track each student’s performance
• Word lists for students to read, write, and manipulate
• Dictation sentences
• Reading cards
• Recording sheets for students to complete assessment activities

You’ll want your phonics activities to cover a variety of activities including oral activities (how students hear, say, and work with different sounds), spelling, and reading. 

Within each of those categories, you’ll need activities to assess a number of skills. For example, students should be able to identify individual sounds, identify syllables, blend sounds, segment sounds, manipulate sounds, and identify the spellings of a focus sound. You can assess these skills by asking questions like “How many sounds do you hear in the word rake?,” segmenting sounds and asking students to tell you the word, and then giving students a word and asking them to segment out the sounds like you were doing. 

You’ll need word lists, dictation sentences, reading cards, and recording sheets for each sound you want to assess students for. For example, you’ll need one set of assessment tools for the sound /ae/, and separate sets for sounds /ow/ and /er/. 

Phonics assessments at the ready

Creating assessments isn’t hard, but it can be time-consuming. That’s why done for you phonics assessments are so valuable. Phonics Progress Monitoring Tracking Sheets for Alternative Spellings makes assessment easy. 

This pack includes 17 sets of progress monitoring assessments to help you monitor student progress with alternate spelling sounds. The sets cover these sounds: 

• Set 1: sound /ae/, spellings < a, ai, ay, ea, a-e >
• Set 2: sound /ee/, spellings < e, ea, ee, y, ey >
• Set 3: sound /oe/, spellings < o, oa, ow, o-e, oe >
• Set 4: sound /er/, spellings < er, ir, or, ur, ear >
• Set 5: sound /e/, spellings < e, ea, ai >
• Set 6: sound /ow/, spellings < ou, ow >
• Set 7: sound m/oo/n, spellings < oo, ew, ue, u-e, o, ou >
• Set 8: sound /ie/, spellings < i, ie, y, i-g, igh >
• Set 9: sound b/oo/k, spellings < oo, u, oul >
• Set 10: sound /u/, spellings < o, oo, ou, u >
• Set 11: sound /s/, spellings < s, ss, st, c, ce, se, sc >
• Set 12: sound /l/, spellings < l, ll, al, el, il, le, ol >
• Set 13: sound /or/, spellings < or, aw, a, ar, au, al, ore >
• Set 14: sound /air/, spellings < air, are, ear, ere, eir, ayer, ayor >
• Set 15: sound /ue/, spellings < ue, ew, u, u-e >
• Set 16: sound /oy/, spellings < oi, oy >
• Set 17: sound /ar/, spellings < ar, a, al, au >

Each set includes oral activities, spelling activities, and reading activities so that you can understand where students need additional support. Each set can be differentiated for student abilities by using 1-, 2-, or 3- syllable words to determine how far students have progressed. 

Each set includes everything you need to conduct phonics assessments and analyze student progress. You get: 

• Assessment summary sheet to score individual items.
• Teacher recording sheet for oral activities.
• Teacher recording sheet for spelling and reading activities.
• Student reading card.
• Student recording sheet for spelling activities.

Phonics assessments are vital — why not make them easy on yourself? Get your phonics assessments pack today and you’ll be all set to monitor student progress on alternative spellings: Phonics Progress Monitoring Tracking Sheets for Alternative Spellings.