When do they move on from Biff, Chip & Kipper?

[SewMuchToLearn]

DS is 7, some developmental delay and is in a country where he only started school and learning letters this year. Plus he hates trying to read. We don't have access to a library with English books. The info their website splits it into age group, which means nothing much to me as the first ever book he has just read today (

You might want to move this/repost into Primary Education, where there is more traffic and there are lots of knowledgable posters regarding learning to read.

IME children starting to learn to read at age 7 learn a lot faster than those starting to learn at age 4. Is your DS learning to read in English at school, or in a different language?
So whereas they say, roughly, that levels 1-3 are reception, levels 4-6 are Year 1, and levels 7-9ish Year 2 - I'd expect someone starting to learn to read at age 7 to move through the levels much quicker. I don't know how the developmental delay you mention might factor into this though.

The regular Biff Chip and Kipper books go up to level 11 (lime) I think - but recently there have been new, more advanced books published ('Time Chronicles' I think) that go beyond that.

The above is in answer to your question, however, having said all that, I'd strongly advise you to get decodable books for your DS rather than Biff Chip and Kipper ones. And once your DS has got to grips with using phonics to decode new words, there are much more interesting books out there than the formulaic Biff Chip and Kipper stories. So you can 'move on' from them as soon as you like, and actually, you needn't ever start with them...

Sorry, missed one part of your question. No, I don't think that at level 3 BC&K your DS would be able to manage Usborne Beginners. More like level 8 or 9.

The problem with BC&K books is that they use 'look and say' methods, so the child learns to recognise (rather than decode) a few more words per book. But does not learn a strategy of tackling new words outside of that context. You'd need to have gained a lot of sight vocabulary before being able to read Usborne Beginners books.

Many phonics book series somewhat confusingly use the same 'levels' (with number 1-11, colours pink, red, yellow, blue, green, orange, turquoise, purple, gold, (white, lime)). Generally speaking (it varies by series), by level 6-orange, the child will have covered all the phonics they need to tackle pretty much any book they wish to. After that, it is mostly a question of building stamina (longer books), more complex sentence structures, and topics moving away from what children are familiar with.
So when using phonics/decodable books, once you've reached level 6, you could easily tackle Usborne Beginners, especially if the topic is of particular interest to your child.

Thank you Big. I already got it moved from chat . Very useful posts. He is not learning to read in English at school, although the basic phonics are the same the more complicated ones aren't. So I don't want to push it and am just taking it slowly when he feels like it. He is finding the first year at school tough, he hasn't picked up reading (in school language) any where near as fast as the rest of the class and we are looking at him repeating the year. He has specifically asked to read in
English with me though. We first started looking a the books when he was 4, and whilst he could spell out the letters had no clue that they made a word. This has only clicked in the last week or so.

Do you have a different series of books you'd recommend over the B,C &K ones?

Non-decodable books such as BC&K are tricky because if you know the basic letter sounds e.g. the letter 'a' makes the sound /a/ as in apple, a word where the code is a bit more complex, then you can't fit the letters together into a word. So you CAN read 'cat' but not 'lake' which would sound. But BC&K books contain lots, in fact mostly such words. They rely on the child using the pictures to guess what the word may be, and then recognise the whole word again in a later book. So it is no surprise that he struggled earlier!

It sounds like he has recently 'clicked' with blending, perhaps due to learning at school in his other language - blending is essentially the same process in any alphabetic language. That's great! Sometimes children manage this a bit later, but often once they've 'got it', they start making rapid progress.

Seeing as he can now blend letters (sounds) into words, I'd say it is all the more important to use 'decodable' books to practise reading in English. Levels 1-3 in ORT terms use only very simple phonics, later you start getting split digraphs etc which can be a bit confusing for struggling learners especially if it is their second 'reading language'.

You could use:
Songbirds series by Julia Donaldson (there are often cheap sets on the bookpeople page)
Floppy's phonics, if you want to stay with the BC&K characters
Jelly & Bean
Dandelion (readers/starters; they also have an app that comes highly recommended on MN)

I can also recommend Oxford Reading Owl (online); you can get lots of free, levelled e-books (tick 'phonics books'). Even if you don't want DS to read online, you can use it as a guide for yourself, to find books that he can decode and assess if they might be of interest to him/catch his attention.

Btw our DS is the other way around, learning English at school and learning to read our home language at home. For us it was a matter of 'extending him sideways' to provide some extra challenge, as he was finding school work very easy. Others who have bilingual children have been saying they'll wait with introducing reading in their other language until their kids are reasonably secure in reading in English. From that perspective I'd say in your situation, perhaps wait a bit with the English? However I find that children are most able to learn when they are keen to learn, so I wouldn't worry too much about confusing him, and just go with his interest!

Problem is, DS is very strict on which language he uses with which person. So he will only speak .English with me and is adamant he doesn't want to read in school language with me.

I tried to teach him before he started School as everything I read said the child will find it easier to read in his mother tongue before learning to read in his second language. Thanks for the suggestions, am not a fan of the online books, would rather paper for now.