My Reception class hasn’t secured Phase 3 – their assessments were really wobbly – what should I do?

This is a question we often see in Spring. Please do not worry if you had a rather red assessment heat map in Spring 1, follow this seven-point plan and it will turn green in Spring 2.

In Reception, we teach all the GPCs that the children will need to know in the first half of the year. This means the rest of the time in Reception is spent embedding and extending this learning.

• Reteach any GPCs that were very wobbly before starting Spring 2 planning. The trigraphs ‘ear’ ‘air’ and ‘igh’ are often the culprits – use the Phase 3 Additional blending lessons from Daily Keep-up to do this.
• Start Spring 2: it begins with reviewing all the Phase 3 GPCs .
• Run the complete Phase 3 Additional blending lessons in the afternoon for any children who are wobbly with Phase 3 (10 minutes a day).
• Repeated practice throughout the day. Grab moments to ensure lots and lots of shuffle time of the GPCs and Phase 3 words outside the lessons.
• Use your AfL to decide which additional words to add to the review pack every day – remember you are the expert about what your class needs.
• Ensure any child that is behind their peers gets the individual/group support they need – daily.
• Reassess after 3 weeks and add results to the assessments tracker to see the impact. It will give you a sense that you are going green and give the children their new reading book levels.