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

[FishChipsandKipper]

DS was moving steadily through reading levels until a senior teacher decided this was all wrong and said no one can move levels until they’ve given ‘the verbal answers I approve of’ to show comprehension.

DS has now been on the same level for over a year and read some books 5 times.

DS has a speech delay, but can read well and answers multiple choice questions written down to show comprehension.

Do the school accept this? No. I’ve given up and bought my own reading books off Amazon.

Why do schools do this??

But multiple choice is basically giving them the answer. Asking a child to actually understand and comprehend in their own words is important. I agree with the way it’s done.

I have a child with language issues. Inference is an issue for him. We have to teach inference by modeling it and talking about it in lots of different books, in real life and on tv etc, not reading the same book over and over.

This argument doesn’t make sense. I never said someone won’t succeed in life because they find comprehension difficult. We are also fully aware of biases from our own experiences and work hard in the teaching profession to reflect on what we do and how we teach.

Scientists need to be able to read and interpret data. Historians also need to do the same. We read a wide variety of texts in comprehension lessons.

The primary curriculum is more than just reading btw. I also teach STEM, outdoor learning, PE, maths, writing (and far more report writing than creative writing), art, drama, music, etc.

My friend has a non verbal child. He can still read for meaning. He can read a text and point at pictures. So you can say 'how do you think main character felt about the snow' and he can pick a picture of a face showing an appropriate emotion to the context.
I dont think you can expect children with productive language issues to demonstrate comprehension in the same way.

I often fully understood what I had read but couldn't be arsed to chat about it after reading - I just wanted to get on with reading the next book.

So yes, trying to get a comprehension answer out of me would be like trying to get blood out of a stone. It didn't mean I hadn't understood, it just meant that (even as a pre schooler) I read books as an introverted pleasure not to discuss them. It's why I don't like book clubs.

I have two first class degrees so I think we can be satisfied that letting me read whatever I liked didn't do me any intellectual harm. Thankfully my home probably had more books in than the average library (and I was also taken to the library often) so it didn't matter what books were dished out at school

I remember my English teacher complaining that I hadn't done a book review every week in a half term in year 5 - my peers were reading Sweet Valley High and Enid Blyton. I had read Grapes of Wrath and A Tale of Two Cities.

When my mum went in to set my English teacher straight the teacher hadnt heard of Grapes of Wrath (!) and didn't realise it was a huge (and brilliant) novel. I've read it in every decade of my life since then and each time I see it with new eyes, but that doesn't take away from my first read of it. Maybe I didn't understand every word or concept, or at least as I got older I had a more layered understanding, but I definitely understood the themes and the arguments and I loved the descriptions and the story.

Fully agree with this!

As a competent and literate adult I think it’s hard to place yourself in others’ shoes on this. I volunteered to read with primary school children and a lot of them were perfectly capable of reading the sounds, but if you asked them questions about what they’d read, shockingly little had actually gone in.

I'm a primary school teacher and I've also done reading books differently to my colleagues.
I move them through the levels based on decoding, not comprehension. Then move them to free reader (they can choose their own reading books) when they can read a few pages of Mr Majeka fluently.
We also spend a lot of class time reading, sharing and talking about stories. My kids love reading and stories. Therefore they also read in their own time. Therefore their comprehension, although I didn't care about it when they were on the reading bands, is amazing and they perform amazingly on end of year assessments.
But not all teachers do that second part of story immersion. Why? Because the primary curriculum is far too full and there isn't time.
The only way I can manage it is devoting less time to other subjects. Music is often watching a few YouTube videos of songs from a new genre and a dance around the classroom. French frankly doesn't get taught at all. I do it because I believe the best way to set them up as lifelong learners is to get them loving stories. But I am technically not playing by the rules.

Well, to get two first class degrees, you must have found a way to communicate your knowledge to someone at the university who awarded you the degrees.

The thing is, ops child can read whatever they like, regardless of books that get sent home. If OP is unhappy, she should communicate with the school. I’m always happy to talk to parents about their child’s education and what the parent thinks is best for them.

Teachers have to find a way to measure a child’s understanding of a lesson. For non verbal children, or non-writers, there are different ways to ascertain this information. However, if you knew the information and didn’t engage with the lessons, or show the teacher what you were reading, they are going to find it hard to know what you’re capable of. Teachers are not superhuman mind readers. They’re normal, fallible people who are trying hard to figure out what skills children have or haven’t got and are trying to help develop the child they see before them.

There aren’t many teachers keeping children on lower level work for a laugh. We actually have quite a lot of pressure to show that children are achieving highly and have to quantify what we’re doing to help children who are not at the expected level.

Are they still doing that? That happened to ds more than a decade ago.

Take your child to the public library or book shop every weekend. Let them choose their own reading books. Make sure they always have something interesting/exciting/fun to read at home.

My ds' primary school did the 'they don't have comprehension' thing while ds happily worked his way through the Secret Seven, Famous Five, Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter.

I think schools do it to prevent too wide a range of reading books in a class. Or because the school library is lacking and they don't have the resources.

I do agree with this. I used to do benchmarking as a volunteer and there were children who really hadn't understood a word they had read. But ops child has a spech delay and a specialist who has made recommendations and they arent being used according to op. So I dont think its fair to say the child hasn't understood on that basis.

@Goatinthegarden

I do agree, but what I’m trying to say is : your child who cannot understand complicated plots or relationships between characters. I’d say DS will be the same and will always struggle with that type of creative thinking.

In DS’s case the potential reasoning at school is that : because he is not verbalising an understanding of relationships between characters - he should stay back and read the same book 5 times. However : he may show excellent comprehension (in his own way) of a ‘fact’ book several bands higher.
DP is extremely technical and excelling in his career. He struggles with social inference. I ‘get’ social inference but am rubbish with anything technical. If we were back in a female-led primary environment - would I be more likely (than DP) to be seen as a ‘good student’ because I can write a good story and see relationships between characters. Is that fair on DP? And in extreme cases - is it fair that such a high level of exclusions etc are primarily boys?

We had this 13 years ago with my dd who started school already able to read to about level 6. Despite the qualified teacher who ran her nursery confirming this and stating her comprehension was fine, school insisted on giving her books with no words and then cat hat bat type ones for ages.

As others have said we mostly just read the school books in ten seconds and continued buying borrowing and reading more interesting books at home. My dd did not have speech delay but was extremely quiet at nursery/school so a bit similar in that she perhaps wasn't very forthcoming with answers even tho she understood the story perfectly.

The best thing our Dds school did for comprehension was a 2 book system - but one book had no words at all, just pictures, one had both.

The kids brought the no word books home and wove a story to us based on inference. Then later in the year when they had developed reading skills, brought home the words and pictures books and were so delighted when they read the words and it was all about what they had told us. "I said that, mummy!".
And yet there were sooooo many parent complaints of the "not doing that", "reading?!, there's no words", "what a waste of time?" variety.
I was a parent helper that listened to readers (reception and ks1) was lovely hearing the stories they made up to the pictures.

Not for a child with comunicaction issues. It means any child with speech and language issues will be held back. The school should utilise the senco or a salt and find ways to work around this.

Oops, cross posted...

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.

@Runnersandtoms

I think Harper Lee nailed it!

treehouseletter.com/2015/10/16/why-scout-finch-hates-school-the-best-novel-of-the-century-on-progressive-education/

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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 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.

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!