How do you know your child's reading age?

[Wallace]

Lots of threads recently about reading ages. I was wondering how so many of you know your child's reading age - do they get tested at school?

Ds (6) is reading books with a reading age of 8/9 (worked out using FOG readability scale - thanks roisin!) but I don't think he has a reading age of 8/9. So how id it worked out?

I was surprised at the reading ages of the books I looked at - The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe worked out as a reading age of 16!
His stage 5 ORT has a reading age of 7, but on the ORT website it says it is for age 5.5 - 6. (I know the results will vary)

God, I have no idea.

He reads GINN books and is on the last book of level 6.
I have no idea if that good, bad or average.

So it is not just me that doesn't know then

ds (year 3,aged 7) came out at about 8-9 on the scale I did recently but no idea if he is really that. Think he's on the same books as LTH's ds atm but finds them quite easy (and aren't some of them dull). He got bored of ORT at stage 11 int he middle of last year and these seem no more difficult. He reads Horrid Henry , Roald Dahl, Usborne readers etc at home with no problem.

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My ds is nowhere near reading Roald Dahl etc. I think that his school take the ORT books very slowly. We are in Scotland so he started school age 5 last August (he is P2 now) - they started on the books with no words. They didn't have a permenant teacher for the first 6 months so things went very slowly. Since then he has been working steadily through each stage reading all the trunk books and extra stories packs A and B! The rest of his class are on ORT stage 3 or 4.

DS was assessed last year. I would be interested in the FOG readability scale tho.

permanent not permenant!

blueteddy - silly question, but do you find the average child has a reading age the same as their real age?

ds didn't start to read until he was 5 1/2 as we were abroad and his international school didn't teach them before then. He didn't do every book of each level of ORT and only had a book a week whereas dd (4) already gets a new one every day. He is still on par with some of the others in his class (now in UK) who began at least a year earlier !

is there a link to FOG ?

Sorry it is fog readability index

1. Choose a sample text from the book. It should be exatly 100 words. (Handy hint mark the beginning and end of your sample text lightly with a pencil).

2. Count the number of complete sentences. Write this down. (a)

• Count the total number of words in these sentences, and write it down. (b)

• Calculate the average sentence length (b/a)

3. Count the number of words of 3 or more syllables in the sample text. (c)

4. Now calculate (b/a) + c (d)

5. The FOG index is 0.4 * d

To convert FOG to a reading age consult chart below.

FOG -> Reading Age
1 -> 6
2 -> 7
3 -> 8
4 -> 9
5 -> 10
6 -> 11
7 -> 12
8 -> 13
9 -> 14
10 -> 15
11 -> 16
12 -> 17
13 -> 18

Thanks again to roisin for posting this for me the other day

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I thought that is how it should be, but you hear of so many children with a reading age a lot higher tahn their age, and not many (or none!) with an age appropriate reading age or lower.

Reading age can vary enormously according to the tests used. For example, some tests (eg Schonell or Burt) test decoding skills - whether a child can read a word - but not comprehension - whether they know what it means. Some other types of reading tests are designed to test reading comprehension by assessing the answers to graded questions. In general, I've heard (though don't quote me on this ), decoding scores are usually ahead of comprehension scores ie a child can read more than they can understand, though I guess that's not always the case.

Blimey, what a faff trying to work it out though.

I'll just say he can read

He can read...but are you any good at maths

singersgirl - that is true. dd was tested at the age of 4 and given a reading age of 7.8yrs. Have no idea what test was used though. However, her comprehension level was just over a year lower than her reading age.

Even at age 11 she was tested (again no idea what test was used) and she was given a reading age of 15. This time her comprehension was markedly up but there would still be quite a few words she didn't the meaning of. I have to encourage her to use a dictionary so she isn't just blindly reading things, and it helps her comprehension no end.

QueenEagle, I've heard that about a year's difference is common - true too for my DS1 who had at 6.5 a comprehension age of 9yr 11m but a decoding age of nearly 11.
Also, even though quite young children can score quite high reading ages on tests, they can't always read with the stamina that a child of that actual age would be able to do. So DS1 at 5.5 had a reading age of 8.5 or something, but that was only for short passages. He couldn't have tackled e.g. Roald Dahl at that age (even though of course some 5 year olds can).

My son was tested using the Salford reading test. He's 5 and a half and it showed he had a reading age of nine. He is able to read Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton and such like independently. We didn't teach him he just picked it up really early because he loved having stories read to him. The Salford test was really simple to do

Ha, my ds is very good at reading for a four year old, I think, but his mummy is so crap at maths that Wallace's post looked like 'numbers...blah...impossible to work out....blah....far too much work...blah...more numbers...' to me

Not all children have a decoding reading 'age' in advance of their comprehension 'age.' Children with specific learning difficulties (eg Dyslexia) often have a higher comprehension age. Reading tests vary enormously. IMHO, something like the Salford test is rather simplistic, but it is easy and quick to administer so I can understand why it's widely used in schools. It's also important to remember that there's a wide range of scores encompassed within the 'average' - sometimes parents get very concerned if told their child is 6 months 'behind' - a retest the next day could get a different score altogether!

I'm not that bad at maths, just too lazy to work it out.
Far to much like hard work for me.

Same for spelling tests, MummyDaydream, which is why my DS's spelling 'age' appeared to go down 9 months in 6 months - he wasn't really any worse at spelling, it was just a different list of words....

About spelling tests - ho ho ho (well, it is nearly Christmas!). Some teachers have been known to give the words for a looming spelling test as pupils' spelling lists in previous weeks..... the results looked so good for concerned parents!