What age could your child read 'The Gruffalo'

[libraryquery]

Just wondering as my children are a bit older now and I can't remember!

What age do you think a child would be when they could read the text of a book like 'The Gruffalo' by themselves? Not just repeat learned words and phrases, but read the text as if they didn't already know the story?

It fits with the Year 1 National curriculum in England. Obviously some children have higher level reading skills, but it’s on the book list for the end of Year 1 level. Year 1 children are 5 or 6.

There probably is the odd outlier three-year-old with sufficient knowledge of trigraphs to decode ‘frightfully’, and if they are anywhere then they are to be found on MN! Nevertheless most of the children reading the text very early are likely to be doing so at least partly from memory, which is no criticism but is a different skill to pure decoding.

As pp have said the Julia Donaldson picture books are written to be read aloud by an adult, hence the rhyme and bouncy metre. The structure and repetition also mean that they are very memorable. If you want decodable JD books then she wrote a range for the Oxford reading tree called Songbirds.

Read proper 5-6, recite from memory 2-3, I have a very cute video of Ds doing the latter but I am not under any illusion he was actually reading.