To be fed up with primary teachers holding readers back due to ‘comprehension’?

Buy him books he enjoys and encourage daily reading for pleasure. Also have a harder bedtime story that you read to him and discuss. My kids could read when they started school but still had to do each level. I let school focus on that and I bought them a variety of books. And they have free access to library audio books and often listen and draw etc. I only write their own books in the logs.

They also read song lyrics so they can sing along.

All still read for pleasure and are excited when second hand book parcels arrive at home.

Reading chest is good for younger readers and brilliant for general knowledge if you focus on their non fiction range.

I really wouldn't worry about it. Read to him at home, choose your own books. My child's school take ages to swap books, I've given up, we just read what we want at home and do the accelerated reader quizzes online based on those. I don't know why parents get so het up about moving up bands. You know what your son can read and understand that's more important than the schools tick boxes. I wouldnt get worked up about it.

I used to get them to choose a book, then read a chapter of a book I had chosen. When older we took it in turns to read to each other.

Btw I think Tonies are lovely presents for the grandchildren.

Yes in my experience the primary school teachers that you can tell were very advanced at school themselves are far more happy to give extension work in maths/get comfortable with reading outside the "reading scheme" books etc.

Love this and its true!
Two of my children are severely dyslexic. Iv always read books that I enjoyed to them at bedtime as they were never going to be able to read them themselves. One discovered a love of audiobooks at 8 and realised he could access all the books his peers were reading. Its been 6 years and teachers are often still astonished by his vocabulary and comprehension when he has the reading and writing level of someone 5 years younger.

I listen to audio books with my severely dyslexic nephew, he has a gloriously eclectic taste and loves all sorts of literature. It's a total thrill for him. (I would read to him but I have a speech difficulty and can't read for long stretches)

Reasonable adjument - ask that in future he is given the comprehension questions in written format and writes the answers.

I detested the reading scheme books, detested the having to read them out loud in a noisy classroom and absolutely despised whole class reading out loud as it was so painfully slow and it really didn't seem to help the kids in the class who were finding it hard to read to have us all know they were struggling - but my older brother (who was undiagnosed but looking back, was clearly autistic) explained to me - having had our mother really annoy him just beforehand by declaring that he couldn't read until he was ten - that the point of the boring books and reading them out loud was to show the teacher that you could read and understand what you had read.

And once you did that, sooner or later they'd leave you alone so you could read the stuff you were actually interested in.

The logic worked for me. Wasn't enjoyable in the slightest, though, other than perhaps in terms of ticking off another level - and I didn't appreciate the 'we've got some extension books you can read now' at all. But they did give up and let me read what I wanted from the top year's reference library by the summer term. So he was right.

School reading books are part of a whole guided reading system which supports children's progress in all aspects of reading, usually refered to as VIPERS (vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and summary). More recently prosedy has been added to this list.

This has nothing to do with reading for pleasure at home which is encouraged, nor has it anything to do with a child's ability to decode. If your child is becoming frustrated with the books they are reading through school, start to work on developing their reading skills (ie VIPERS, not decoding). If they are not getting the inference or cannot explain the author's choice of particular words or character's motivation, they will need to work on this before they can move up.
Most of all, do not rely on books from school to develop your child's reading and love of reading. Get to your local library and explore what they want to read.

This reminded me of a year 4 class I had once. We were trialling a year where all literacy teaching was done around a meaty novel for each six week period. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Kensuke's Kingdom type level. That involved me, or an able reader, reading the novel aloud for 15 minutes a day. I will never forget the severely dyslexic boy in my class that year, still struggling on basic readers, who was absolutely enthralled, listening to every word and his higher level comprehension skills were so obvious in class discussions; he outshone even my most able readers. My advice to parents always was to read quality novels to your child from as early as they can engage with them. You reading to your child is just as important as them reading to you if you want to develop higher level comprehension skills. I loved that way of teaching Literacy as I could share my love of literature without reading levels holding children back.

We had a similar experience with our eldest. She loves to read and her reading age is well beyond her years but her teacher wanted her to read more basic texts and be able to talk about the themes. To avoid her feeling demoralised we looked at ways we could encourage her love of books beyond school. We also found in terms of the book they would read in class , dd would read ahead and when the teacher asked questions about 10 pages back dd would be slow in answering. She also responds better when working in a small group as is shy expressing herself infront of the whole class.

We worked on it by going to the library and choosing books she was interested in. She likes non fiction and retains facts really well so we looked at a book about ancient Egyptians and we worked on comprehension from there.Some questions asked were testing her direct recall, others gave her more of an option to discuss why she thought they did certain processes, what the significance could be etc. It's to get them to explore the nuances of the text and those skills are needed as they get older. So many adults take what they read as gospel and cannot read between the lines or analyse texts.

I would speak to the school and explain that he finds this demoralising and or boring and it is affecting his interest in reading. Work with them on ways in which you can support him, encouraging him to talk about books he enjoys reading. Our school also worked on doing show and tell and getting the kids to do presentations so they could practice speaking infront of others which has really helped our dd.There are lots of free comprehension exercises you can print off online to give him practice too.

Yes that is the excuse that they use but I don't believe it is remotely true and if it is then that is the fault of the boring story not the reader.

My son essentially taught himself to read and write (30 years ago). It drove me crazy then. It is always the less imaginative teachers that do this. Frustrating but he will soon be able to read his own choice of books.

I agree that the school should be finding a way to adapt things to work with his speech issues. I currently work with a Y2 boy with severe speech delay (he was completely non-verbal until just after Easter this year), and have experimented until we found a way that works for him.

For comprehension questions, he has a printed copy of the text and highlighters. We read the question and then he highlights the relevant sentence/key words. He also has emotion/action cards that he can point to for inference questions. It is clear he understands what he's reading, he just can't verbalise it yet!

I also have two puppets that he really responds to - The Word Wizard for literacy, and a pirate called Captain Counting. He will happily do what the captain asks him to do, and will use limited, but appropriate, maths language to talk to him in a way that he just doesn't for me. If I say "Are there more sharks than seashells?" he probably won't answer, but if the puppet asks, we'll get "Sharks more, Captain, aarr!"

You just have to find what works for the child in front of you!

My father took me to the library every week, he had a love of literature. He'd pick up books in the adult section he thought suitable add them to his stack for me. At eight I read my first Dickens novel. True I didn't comprehend all of it but I got the gist.

I read Asimov, Fahrenheit 451, science fiction, swallows and Amazon's, Enid Blyton, Thorne Smith. Jekyll and Hyde. This led to a lifetime love of sci-fi, fantasy, adventure historical novels.

Maybe having a male teacher in him helped. Because I recall not one book that I was issued in primary school.

Reading should transport you. My husband tuts because when my nose is in a book and he talks to me I genuinely don't hear him.

Absolutely agree about the non fiction :my older one aged about 6 loved reading facts about lengths and weights from a DK vehicle encyclopaedia. Great practice for maths units and generally understanding that sort of information so I would definitely argue it was valuable reading. But it wasn't the kind of book that anybody would read cover to cover so even if AR had had a quiz on it he couldn't have answered it as he hadn't read the entire book. He also answered plenty of fiction quizzes so he was fine but it does seem unfair for kids who are both struggling with reading and prefer facts to fiction..

My daughter has just started Year 7, and a few days in to the new term I had an email to say she’d be taking part in Lexonik Advance Intervention - which supports the reading, spelling and comprehension of academic vocabulary.

i was really confused, as she’s always read to a higher reading level in school, her previous teachers never highlighted an issue and her SPAG SATS results were really good. Turns out they do with every year 7, because they’ve found that when it comes to exams students struggle with reading the question papers correctly as they aren’t absorbing all the info given.
Since then I’ve sat with my daughter whist she does her homework a few times and will ask her to read out the questions - the other day she inserted a word that wasn’t there 3 times!

Comprehension is so important, and it’s not something I’d thought of before.

sounds like your sons school isn’t going about it in a way that fosters a love of reading though.

I get what you’re saying, and a good teacher should be aware that a child might struggle with inference in a story, but shine in other areas. That doesn’t mean they won’t persist in also trying to develop their inference skills.

Subject skills are interchangeable. I get told things regularly like, ‘well they’re not interested in art’ or ‘they won’t need art’. We teach motor skills through art, we teach language and emotions through art. You don’t need to be artistic to enjoy looking at art. I have no idea what these children will want to pursue when they’re older. I want them to have a broad range of skills and experiences as a foundation.

My current (older) pupil who likes stories for much younger children, is very interested in coding and engineering and outperforms all other pupils in these lessons. Certainly I, and other teachers I know, do not put children on a shelf that matches the band of books they’re sending home.

Of course, I don’t know your child, your child’s teacher or their thought process My advice would be to address your concerns directly with the teacher. I would be very interested to listen to what your child is able to do at home and discuss how that compares to what I see in the classroom, or what skills I’m trying to develop. A good teacher would certainly try to find a wider variety of appropriate reading material.

I’d also take your son to the library and choose lots of books for you to read together - non fiction is great if he’s interested in them. Reading them together, particularly if its subjects he is engaged in, will encourage lots of discussion and will help his speech as well.

I thoroughly agree that some children (mainly but not necessarily boys) aren't so fond of fiction and will devour practical and technical books and encyclopedias with great understanding and enthusiasm and will be able to answer questions about what they have read.
This forcing of fiction carries on until GCSE English language which is also full of poetry. No questions of the form "write an instruction leaflet" "describe how to do x"

Reading the same book over and over is ridiculous, completely apart from the debates about moving up levels or not. I wonder whether it is a small village school? (Esp as it sounds like infants only).
A bit of a tangent but I went to a 'watch your child's lesson' session once and year 2 children each had to say a sentence starting 'I infer that.... ' probably a requirement of the national curriculum but it was a bit mad. How many adults know what 'I infer' means or would ever in a million years use it in a sentence? Ditto my small children explaining to me what a fronted adverbial or a digraph is. Does it actually help them to learn reading or writing??
I also mostly ignored the reading books from school and just followed the children's interests via the library etc. I mostly had no idea what level they were supposed to be on. They were never given the same book over and over though.
It sounds like you have some bigger issues than the reading in terms of wider support from the school for your son's needs and treating him as an individual.
I have two children who are quite different in lots of ways and have both needed different types of support in school. I always felt that all the different class teachers were listening to me and trying their best to support them as individuals within the constraints of the system.

There are also lists online of appropriate stories for certain school years which are good to use as a guide. For example The Giraffe the Pelly and Me for a year 2.
So if going to the library you could pick one of the deemed age appropriate and your child could pick another.
Oxford reading scheme also has a lot of ereaders on their website if you want a look at the schemes.

I think the female led primary environment is a bit of a red herring. The teachers are generally following the national curriculum and preparing a child for SATs at the extreme end. The curriculum is very famously 'gove-ified'. The expert panel writing the curriculum had more men than women originally.
If they favour story writing, its because thats the skills the school is meant to teach rather than female teachers being biased towards it. Stuff like specific phonics programmes were also pushed by the dfe.

Oops, cross posted...