Task 1 - Letter Knowledge: Upper and Lower Case
Why this task?
  • Assesses the ability to label letters

How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Strengthen the association between a letter and its name, its sound, or a word which begins with the letter.
Task 2 - Rhyme Recognition Oddity
Why this task?
  • Assesses child's sensitivity to a recurring coarse grained (large unit of sound involving the final vowel and consonant in a word) between words and the recognition of pattern absence in another word.
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Providing, recognising, suggesting, volunteering rhyming words
  • Teaching nursery rhymes
  • Picking the odd one out in a list of words, at least two of which rhyme
Task 3 - Phonetic Spelling
Why this task?
  • Assesses child's ability to convert speech sounds into corresponding letters (early sound to letter conversion)
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Teach associations between speech sounds and letters which can represent them
  • Teach child how to 'break' words into individual sounds and then to write the letter for the sounds
Task 4 - Copying
Why this task?
  • Assesses motor control, hand-eye coordination and ability to see detail
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Develop pencil skills
  • Develop fine motor skills
  • Encourage drawing especially noting fine detail
Task 5 - Rapid Automatised Naming: Digits
Why this task?
  • Assesses the speed with which a child can access the name of a set of digits set down in print.  Important for later comprehension skill.
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Vocabulary development
  • Pointing out the junctions of lines in digits and the slope, curve and direction of these lines
Task 6 - Letter Sound Array
Why this task?
  • Assesses ability to provide a sound label for a printed letter
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Strengthen association between the letter and its sound - teach pure sounds (without the schwa or uh sound) attached to consonants
  • Look out for difficulties between j and g sounds, and v and f sounds, y and v sounds.
  • Teach the b,d,p and q letter sound associations well separated in time and use multi-sensory teaching methods (saying letter, talking through the pattern of formation using sand, sandpaper, shaving foam, play dough, etc to make the letters)
Task 7 - Alliteration
Why this task?
  • Assesses ability to hear similar initial sounds of words

How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Provide words and pictures of items which begin with similar sounds
  • Children discriminate between similarity of initial sounds volunteering similar sounds, etc.
Task 8 - Alliteration Oddity
Why this task?
  • Assesses ability to hear similar initial sounds of words and to recognise a dissimilar initial sound in a collection of 3 or 4 initial words
  • Earliest introduction to phonemic awareness (fine grained phonological awareness)
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Providing, recognising, suggesting, volunteering sounds which are similar and sounds which differ from that pattern
Task 9 - Timed Rhyme Generation
Why this task?
  • Assesses ability to reach into long term memory and retrieve words which rhyme with a provided word
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Nursery rhymes
  • Rhyme recognition
  • Rhyme recognition at speed
  • Rhyme production
  • Rhyme production at speed
Task 10 - Digit Span
Why this task?
  • Assesses memory for sounds - important for decoding and reading comprehension
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Build and expand short term memory and working memory
Task 11 - Non-Word Repetition
Why this task?
  • Assesses memory for unfamiliar words - important for decoding and reading comprehension
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Build and expand short term memory and working memory
Task 12 - Initial Phoneme Deletion
Task 13 - Final Phoneme Deletion: Real Word Remaining
Task 14 - Final Phoneme Deletion: Non-Word Remaining
Why this task?
  • Assesses ability to manipulate phonemes (smallest unit of sound) at either the initial or final position of a word
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Print one syllable words
  • Provide exercises involving the analysis of sounds and deletion of either the initial or final consonant in the word.
Task 15 - Non-Word Reading
Why this task?
  • Assesses ability to decode unfamiliar words
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Letter sound conversion (convert sequence of printed letters to sound) and blend these.
Task 16 - Spatial Memory
Why this task?
  • Assesses ability to quickly attend to the location of objects
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Use game involving little animals hopping from one location to another and child required to remember the sequence
Task 17 - Finger Localisation
Why this task?
  • Assesses sensitivity of finger tips for learning about line, slope, texture, edge, curve - important for learning letters, digits, shapes
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Talk children through line, slope, texture, edge, curve, junction details in letters, digits and objects: feely bag activities; haptics
Task 18 - Rapid Automatised Naming: Objects
Why this task?
  • Assesses the speed with which child can access the name of a series of pictured objects.  Important for later comprehension skill
How to help students with difficulties in this area:
  • Vocabulary development
  • Building categories of fruit, vegetables, clothing, games, sports, animals, birds, furniture etc and naming items within these at speed