Many critics of the UK government's age six phonics screening checks (which are to be rolled out nationally in England) have expressed grave concerns about the use of 20 non-words in the assessment.
They need have no such concerns. When children are taught with synthetic phonics (or John Walker in the video of Sounds~Write would say 'linguistic phonics'), blending and segmenting skills become second nature to the learners.
This video clip demonstrates just how easy blending and segmenting is when children are well-taught.
Non-words are very useful for assessing phonics knowledge and skills - although I don't really recommend them for teaching with.
There is no need - there are plenty of unusual or obscure words in cumulative, decodable word banks which are used for teaching synthetic phonics. Learners soon become very adept at blending and segmenting words of all different lengths and structures as you can see on this lovely, short video!
