New to this topic? Start with our companion article: Reading Your Child's Year 1 Phonics Check Results: What They Mean
So the result is in. Whether your child scored 19 or 39, the most common question we hear from parents is the same: "Okay, what do I do with this?"
The honest answer is "not a huge amount, but do it often." The next few months of teaching, plus short, cheerful practice at home, are what move things along.
Start with the teacher
Under the number sits a word-by-word record of which sounds and spelling patterns your child managed and which they didn't. Ask to see it, and take a few questions:
- Which sounds and spellings did my child get, and which are still coming? You want specifics: "the digraphs 'sh', 'ch' and 'th'", "words with adjacent consonants like 'stop' and 'milk'", "the split spellings in 'cake' and 'bike'".
- How did they go on the made-up words compared with the real ones? A child who reads real words well but stalls on made-up ones may be leaning on memory rather than sounding out. That's useful to know.
- What support is planned in class, and what should I do at home to match it? Good phonics teaching follows a sequence, and home practice works best when it practises what's just been taught rather than racing ahead (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018).
- Can we check in again in a few weeks? Agree how you'll hear about progress, so you're not waiting for the next report card.
A few minutes a day on decoding
Short and frequent beats long and rare. A few minutes before dinner, on the days it fits, is a good start; your child's teacher can tell you what to focus on and whether it's enough. A few things that work well:
Sound and spelling games. Write the spellings your child is working on (say, "sh", "ch", "th", "ck") on scraps of paper or sticky notes. Hide them round the kitchen, hold them up at random, stick one on the fridge for the day. The child says the sound, not the letter names: "sh", not "ess-aitch".
Build, read, change. Using magnetic letters or paper squares, build a word together: s-a-t. Read it by saying each sound and blending. Then change one spelling: sat becomes sit, sit becomes sip, and swapping the 's' for 'sh' turns sip into ship. Children love the "I broke it, now fix it" game. Blending (pushing sounds together) and segmenting (pulling them apart) are the two skills that drive everything else here.
Decodable readers. Ask the teacher for books matched to the spellings your child has been taught, so they can succeed by sounding out rather than memorising or guessing. If the book that came home is full of words your child can't yet decode, read it to them and save decoding practice for one they can manage.
Write simple words. Writing is decoding in reverse. Say a word, have your child say each sound aloud and write the spelling for it: "frog" becomes f-r-o-g. Whiteboards, chalk on the driveway, a finger in a tray of rice. Don't fuss over handwriting while they're doing this; the thinking is what counts.
What not to do
Some well-meant habits make the job harder.
Don't drill for an hour. An hour of flashcards on a Sunday afternoon produces a cranky child and not much learning. If practice is becoming a battle, stop, shorten it, and make it sillier.
Don't teach guessing. Looking at the picture and guessing, or glancing at the first letter and shouting a word that fits, might feel like reading in Year 1. It falls apart as soon as the pictures disappear. If your child is stuck, point to the first spelling and say "sounds".
Don't lead with letter names. Letter names ("see", "aitch") are useful for spelling out loud and not much else at this stage. Decoding needs sounds. Our article on why linguistic phonics works explains why sounds come first.
Don't compare. Not with the child next door, not with an older sibling who "just picked it up". Comparisons have a way of landing on your child.
Keep the sound games going
Underneath decoding sits phonological awareness, the ability to hear and play with the sounds in spoken words. It's no-print, no-pencil work and most of it fits into the car, the bath or the walk to school. Gillon (2018) describes phonological awareness as a key contributor to reading and spelling, and it responds well to playful, frequent practice.
- I spy with sounds. "I spy something that starts with /b/." Then make it harder: "something that ends with /t/".
- Robot talk. Say a word in separated sounds, "c-u-p", and have your child blend it. Swap roles so they talk like a robot and you guess.
- Rhyme on the move. "What rhymes with car?" Nonsense answers are fine; "zar" shows they've got the idea.
- Sound swaps. "Say 'cat'. Now change the /c/ to /h/." Harder than it sounds, and very good for six-year-olds.
We've collected more of these in phonological awareness activities.
When a speech pathology assessment helps
For plenty of children, the teacher's plan and a bit of practice at home will do the job. An assessment is worth considering when the result sits alongside speech sound errors still around at six, a history of late talking, hearing concerns or a family history of reading difficulty (our companion article covers these).
What a speech pathology assessment adds is the layer underneath the check. We look at three things:
- Speech sounds. Which sounds your child can say and hear the difference between, and whether a pattern in their speech lines up with a pattern in their decoding.
- Phonological awareness. Whether they can hear, blend, segment and swap sounds in spoken words, which the check assumes but doesn't measure.
- Oral language. Vocabulary, sentence understanding, following a story. Decoding is one half of reading; language comprehension is the other (Hoover & Gough, 1990). A child can decode well and still need support here, and the reverse. Snow (2016) argues that this spoken-language foundation is exactly why early reading belongs within a speech pathologist's work.
We think of this as data collection rather than testing: the aim is a clear picture, not a label. It happens in your home or by video, and with your permission we'll write up what we find so you can share it with the teacher.
A word on Sounds-Write
Alexandra is a certified Sounds-Write practitioner. Sounds-Write is a linguistic phonics programme: it starts with the sounds of spoken English and teaches the spellings that represent them, in a structured sequence, with blending and segmenting built into every lesson. Whatever your child's school uses, we work alongside what's being taught rather than against it, and the ideas in this article are the same ones we use in therapy, at home-sized scale.
If you'd like help making sense of your child's results, or a fuller picture of what sits underneath them, get in touch. Speaking Speech Pathology offers mobile speech pathology across Brisbane's south side and Logan, with home visits and video sessions. Any actual clinical work, whether assessment or therapy, happens in a consultation about your child, not from an article.
Alexandra Bouwmeester is a Senior Speech Pathologist (MSPA, CPSP), a certified Sounds-Write practitioner, with over 14 years' experience and a mum of two boys. She offers mobile speech pathology to families across Brisbane's south side and Logan.
This article is general information and not a substitute for individualised speech pathology assessment or therapy. If you have concerns about your child, please speak with a qualified speech pathologist.
References
- Literacy Hub. (n.d.). What is the Year 1 Phonics Check? Australian Government. https://www.literacyhub.edu.au/for-families/what-is-the-year-1-phonics-check/
- Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5–51.
- Gillon, G. T. (2018). Phonological awareness: From research to practice (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Hoover, W. A., & Gough, P. B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing, 2(2), 127–160.
- Snow, P. C. (2016). Elizabeth Usher Memorial Lecture: Language is literacy is language. Positioning speech-language pathology in education policy, practice, paradigms and polemics. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 18(3), 216–228.
