Hello! This post is all about interpreting your phonics assessments to best meet the needs of your students. We can learn so much from these!
I start with CVC words for beginning readers. This post mainly focuses on that, but the same ideas apply to advanced phonics skills. This is the first assessment I use at the beginning of first grade.
This assessment uses nonsense words. This is because I am looking at specific phonics skills, not necessarily their word recognition skills. Some kids can memorize a whole list of words but not have good decoding skills.
This assessment must be given one -on-one. Give your student the page of nonsense words. While the student is reading the words, follow along on the teacher sheet.
To fully utilize this assessment, don’t just look at correct or incorrect. Take notes about:
- The sounds they make for each letter. (sound-symbol knowledge)
- The student’s ability to blend phonemes (After they have identified the sounds in the word, can they blend those sounds together to make a whole word?)
- The student’s automaticity with identifying sounds. (This shows you how strong their sound-symbol knowledge is. Is it automatic or does it take a moment to retrieve the sound associated with the letter?)
- The student’s rate for reading each word. (Do they go sound by sound, read onset-rime and then blend, or are they reading the whole word).
Taking Notes during a Phonics Assessment
The picture below shows you some common examples of notes I would take.
- The notes I took in the green show c-u-j, which means that the student sounding it out sound by sound. (I would put c-uj to show if a student decodes with onset and rime.)
- The one in the blue shows that the student just read the whole word without going sound by sound. When it is correctly read, I simply put a check. When it is read incorrectly, I’ll write the whole word the way the child read it. This shows that the child did not decode sound by sound, but rather read it as a whole word (but read it incorrectly).
- The green also shows what it looks like when the student says the correct sound, but then blends the sounds together incorrectly. For example, “m-u-p/pup” means that the student said the correct sounds for the letters, but then read pup instead of mup.
Learning From Your Assessment
After the nonsense word assessment, a chart like this may help you keep track of specific skills to work on.
This one is geared toward an assessment for CVC words. This tracks if a student demonstrated knowledge of sound-symbol awareness with just consonants and short vowels, their ability to blend sounds, and their rate.
If you say yes to all of the questions shown above, that means this student is proficient with reading CVC words and likely is ready for the next step.
If not, you’ll need to determine if they…
- Just need more practice with reading CVC words (likely for a beginning reader entering first grade)
- Needs intervention with phoneme blending
- Needs intervention with sound-symbol associations (with just the letters of the alphabet and their most common sounds at this point)
I ask myself these questions to help identify a student’s area of need:
- Are they mixing up VOWEL sounds?
- Yes: Intervention with vowels. Explicit instruction with plenty of student practice.
- No: Check something else.
- Do they know every CONSONANT sound?
- Yes: Check something else.
- No: Identify which letter they do not know. Then, provide practice with those letters. Check to see if there are confusions with voiced and unvoiced pairs (j/ch, d/t, b/p, v/f, z/s, g/k).
- Is there CONSISTENCY to their errors?
- Yes: Target those skills for further practice.
- No: Provide intervention for phonemic awareness, sound/symbol, and decoding.
- Can they BLEND sounds together?
- Yes: Check something else.
- No: Provide intervention for phonemic awareness, specifically with blending and segmenting phonemes. Continue practicing decoding as long as they are proficient with letter identification. Work on encoding (spelling). Use phoneme-grapheme mapping.
- Are they AUTOMATIC with identifying and blending sounds to read the word?
- Yes: They are proficient and ready for the next phonics skill.
- No: Continue to provide plenty of guided and independent practice to improve automaticity. Sometimes practicing onset and rime can help with this.
This flow chart is another way of basically saying the same thing as above, just in a more visual way:
Phonics CVC Word Assessment Examples
The following examples will help illustrate what I may learn from this assessment, as well as what it will lead me to do instructionally.
Example #1
What this Assessment Tells You:
- Strengths: This student is able to blend the sounds at a decent rate for this point in the year. This tells me that the problem is not phoneme blending.
- Areas of Need: in this example, the student’s errors are mainly due to vowel confusion. There are also a couple of consonants that are mixed up.
Next Steps:
I would follow up with a quick sound-symbol assessment to see exactly which letter and sounds this student knows.
Intervention:
- If the student knows most of the letters of the alphabet (and the most common sounds), provide more instruction, modeling, and guided practice with those vowels and consonants that are not mastered. Additionally, continue to provide more practice with reading and spelling CVC words, especially with the vowels that the student often mixes up. A helpful resource can be found here.
- If the student is not automatic with letter-sound recognition, provide intervention with alphabet awareness.
Example #2:
What this assessment tells you:
- Strengths: This student identified all the letters and sounds correctly, so the problem is not with sound/symbol knowledge.
- Note: I wrote stop where the 1 minute time was up. I only had the students continue so I could see if he would identify the sounds in the next two words correctly.
- Areas of need: This student begins by saying the correct sounds for each letter, BUT when it is time to blend those sounds together, they are unable to do so. This is a phonemic awareness issue.
Next Steps:
Follow up with a quick phonemic awareness assessment to see which skills the student is proficient with.
Intervention:
Provide more instruction, modeling, and guided practice with phonemic awareness and orthographic mapping.
- When decoding with this student, you may want to begin with words with just two phonemes and then move up to three OR try onset and rime blending instead of separate phonemes (s-at, p-it).
Free CVC Word Phonics Assessment
You can download this Free CVC word phonics assessment with the rubric by clicking here or the picture below.
Resource: More Phonics Assessments
Want more assessments? If you like this format, check out my Phonics Assessments. It includes decoding words, encoding (spelling) assessments, and decodable sentences for several different phonetic elements. There is also an editable tracking page.
There are individual phonics assessments and one that includes multiple phonics skills on one page.
- If you teach 1st grade, you can likely just start with the CVC word assessment. Remember, you are not just looking for if they can read the words. Group students based on how many words they can read accurately. (You may have a group that is accurate with letter-sound correspondence but they blend those sounds slowly leading to fewer words read. Another group may read the words quickly but they are not as accurate with sound-symbol correspondence, leading to errors. Another group may read the words accurately and with automaticity but still needs a bit more practice reading the words in connected text.
- If a student is able to read the whole thing with ease, then you can consider trying the multiple skills assessment so you can figure out what phonics skills they already have and which ones you will need to teach.
- If your student is unable to read the CVC words, you should do an alphabet assessment (sound-symbol knowledge of the 26 letters and their most common sounds) and a phonemic awareness assessment.
- If you teach 2nd or 3rd grade, I would begin the year with the multiple skills assessment (shown below)
This also includes assessment pages for encoding (spelling) including word lists for each phonics skill. There are two format options: plain lines and sound boxes.
This resource also includes sentences. It’s so important to see how our students are able to apply their decoding skills with connected text. This is especially helpful to use with those kids who do well with the nonsense word assessment. Before assessing new skills, check to see how fluent they are with sentences.
You can find this phonics assessment resource here.
Organizing the Phonics Assessments
This is how I organize my assessments. I print each on a different color (totally unnecessary, just pleasing to my eye). I put these student pages in a page protector. On the other side, I put the master of the teacher page along with a few copies of each tucked inside (see above). I keep the word lists that can be used for the spelling assessments right after those pages.
Other Assessments
If you teach kindergarten, begin with phonemic awareness and alphabet knowledge for assessments.
- You can find free phonemic awareness assessments here
- You can find a free alphabet knowledge assessment here.
- If a student is proficient with both, then you can start the CVC word assessment.
Alphabet Assessment
This alphabet assessment will help you determine which letters your students know and which letters they need to learn. I assess both letter recognition and sound-symbol knowledge for each letter. You can find this free assessment here.
Phonemic Awareness Assessment
I love this assessment because I learn so much from it! Phonemic awareness is one of the greatest indicators of reading success so it is essential that we assess our kindergarteners in this area.
I also like to use it because I end up seeing SO much growth over time. Most kindergarteners who don’t know how to blend or segment phonemes when they first arrive in kindergarten end up picking it up after some instruction and daily practice. By the time I assess again in November or December, I already see huge gains for most of them. The students who don’t make gains need additional intervention with phonemic awareness. Early intervention with phonemic awareness can be so powerful and make a huge difference!
There is space provided for three assessments throughout the year, but some of your students will not need to be assessed all three times. Some may need to be assessed more than three times. I recently updated this with the little graph on the bottom because I wanted to see the growth throughout the year. I pay closest attention to the blending and segmenting progress. At the beginning of the year, it is not unusual for kindergarten students to lack these skills. However, most are pretty proficient by midyear, especially after instruction and practice.
I also added an advanced phonemic awareness page that is great for first-graders and 2nd graders who may be struggling readers.
You can find this free assessment here.
Providing Intervention
So what should you do when one of your students is struggling in one or more of these areas? I have collections of blog posts that may help!