When you add a reader, we may offer a short check before their first book. It finds which letter sounds and word patterns your child already knows, so their books start there instead of from their age alone. Two five-year-olds can be a long way apart, and a book pitched from age can be too easy for one and too hard for the other.
It takes about six minutes, you do it sitting together, and it never uses the microphone.
Where you find it
- Straight after adding a reader. After you press "Add reader" on Add a reader, or add one in the app, the check opens. Tap "Start from their age instead" to skip it. See Adding your first reader.
- On their Progress page. The "Where they start" card has "Find their starting point" if you skipped it, and "Do the check again" if you did it before.
It is only offered for readers whose stories are in English, because it is built on how English spelling is taught, and once you have agreed to our current privacy notice and notice to parents. Readers added by a school are placed by their teacher instead.
What happens in the check
There are up to three short parts. You will see a line at the top marked "For you" that says what to do.
- Letter sounds. You say a sound, such as the sound at the start of "sun", and your child taps the letter that makes it. Say the sound itself, not the letter's name. Where we have a recording of the sound, you can play it instead. This part has between eight and twelve letters.
- Hearing sounds blend. You say a word slowly, one sound at a time, such as "s ... u ... n", and your child taps the matching picture out of four.
- Reading words. One word at a time appears in large letters. Your child reads it out loud to you and you tap "They read it" or "Not yet". Some are silly words that are not real, and they are labeled "a silly word". They are there on purpose: a real word can be remembered, and a silly word can only be sounded out.
The words get harder step by step: short-vowel words like "sun", then words with sh, ch and th, then words with two consonants together like "frog", then silent-e words like "bike", then vowel teams like "rain". The check stops by itself after three words in a row that do not come, so your child is never asked to struggle for long.
Please do not help, sound words out for them, or say whether they were right. If they are stuck for a few seconds, that is a "Not yet", and it is completely normal. Your child never sees a score, a count or a cross.
What you see at the end
When the check finishes, your child sees that they are done. What it found is behind a "See where they start" button, so you can read it without your child reading over your shoulder. It says a few plain things, for example "Knows most letter sounds" and "Starts with short-vowel words like hot, web and fix".
Their books start one step below the highest thing they showed. Books that feel easy for a week or two build confidence, and a book that is too hard is the thing we most want to avoid. If you know your child better, tap Start lower or Start higher to move the start one step. You can do this later from the "Where they start" card too.
If your child read well past the early steps, you may also see Add the one-minute reading. That asks Pip to offer a short passage to read aloud the next time they open their books, which is the reading check described in Moving a reader to another age group. It is the only part that uses the microphone, and you can leave it out.
After the check
- After three finished books, we look at how those books went. If they were hard going, the next books use one set of letter sounds fewer. This happens once, and only if their reading is allowed to move them on its own, which is under Learning in their settings.
- Every ten books, the "Where they start" card offers a two-minute check: a few words read to you, to keep their books in step.
How the sounds are ordered and what a phase is are explained in Reading level and phonics.
What we keep
For each check we keep how many letters, pictures and words there were in each part and how many came, the highest step your child showed, and where that started their books. We do not keep which letters they tapped or which words they read, and there is no recording, because the check never uses the microphone. It is removed when you remove the reader, and it is included when you download your family's data.
This check is not a school assessment and its result is not comparable to one.