It’s time for a FREE Upper Grade Phonics Assessment! This covers many important phonics skills that learners in third through fifth grades need to know!
Teach younger learners? You’ll also enjoy our FREE Phonics Assessment for K-3.
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Upper Grade Phonics Assessment {for 3rd-5th Grade Learners}
One of the important qualities of good teaching with structured literacy is diagnostic or responsive teaching. Diagnostic teaching means that we use what we observe about our learners to guide our teaching.
Assessments are a great tool to help us understand what our learners need.
This upper grade phonics assessment has a 3-page teacher recording sheet in two formats. They can both be seen in the image above.
1- The teacher pages on the left in the image above only have nonsense words underlined.
2- The teacher pages on the right in the image above have nonsense words underlined as well as extra markings such as syllable divisions and vowel sounds. While the one on the left is the one I prefer, if you’re unsure about how the words should be divided or what sound the vowels should make, the version on the right is for you!
This assessment pack also includes three student pages that match the teacher pages. I encourage learners to cover the words to read line by line. Right before publishing this assessment, I added student pages with nonsense words underlined in case you wanted that option, too!
As the learner reads the words {or attempts to read the words}, you mark their attempts. Generally, when a learner missed TWO OR MORE in one section, it tells me I need to start phonics instruction there. In the example above, I would start phonics instruction with Open Syllables {#5}.
Upper Grade Phonics Assessment Skills
15 different phonics skills are included in this assessment, starting with longer words.
While there were many others I could have included, these 15 seemed to be the most common when I looked through different spelling and phonics curricula for grades 3-5. If your scope and sequence doesn’t match my assessment, feel free to create your own using tables and charts in Word or PowerPoint.
See the list below as well as visit the links included for even more resources. Please note that many of these phonics skills include nonsense words on the assessment, too!
1. Closed Syllable Words with Doubles such as rabbit, puffin, or kitten – read more about closed syllables here
2. Closed Syllable Words with different consonants in the middle such as cactus, tomcat, or helmet
3. Inflected Endings with no change in the base word such as jumping, paths, or hunted – find our Inflected Endings Bundle here
4. Longer Closed Syllable Words / Compound Words such as muskrat, backpack, or lipstick – find our compound words pack here
5. Open Syllable Words {in 1st and/or 2nd syllables} such as humid, veto, or latex – read more about open syllables here
6. Open & Closed Syllable Words {V/CV or VC/V} such as focus, raven, or robin – read more about these syllable types here
7. CVCE Syllable Words such as cupcake, female, or combine – read more about CVCe syllables here
8. R-Controlled Syllable Words such as burger, spider, or perfect – read more about r-controlled syllables here
9. Open & Closed Prefixes with words such as restock, mistake, and unpack
10. Common Suffixes – doubling, drop e, and change y to i in words like taping, tapped, and ladies – read more about adding suffixes to words here
11. Vowel Team Syllable Words such as raccoon, maintain, and jigsaw – read more about vowel team syllables here
12. V/V Syllable Words such as neon, create, and lion
13. Final Stable Syllable Words such as beetle, candle, and marble – find more about final stable syllables here
14. Finding Schwa in words such as balloon, upon, and pencil – read more about helping readers identify accented syllables
15. Words with Prefixes and Suffixes such as unoriginal, insignificance, and refreshment
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Enjoy!
~Becky
Wow! This is absolutely amazing. It’s all we will even need even in terms of what to teach and what to assess. I love the nonsense words that have been included. This feels like Christmas. Amazing stuff. Thanks a million!
Aw, you are very welcome! I hope it helps you target those phonics skills with your learners!
Can this be used to assess spelling skills or just reading?
A spelling assessment is typically a little more involved, but I’d say it could work!