Considering paying for Reading Chest over Summer hols for 5yo DS, have others found it good?

[owlelf]

DS is in Reception. When he started he knew no letters or sounds, but has made good progress and is now covering stage 6 phonics.

I'm unsure of his reading level as the books he brings home don't state it clearly (this week he has an Oxford Poem Tree book which says stage 3-4 and a Dandelion Readers Extended code book which says level 2, book2). Basically he can now read a bit.

He doesn't enjoy reading himself at home, he really enjoys being read to though. I think part of his reluctance to read is due to him being a bit lazy, plus the books for his level from school are really dull.

I'm considering subscribing to the Reading Chest over the summer- in an effort to motivate him to enjoy reading himself a bit more. The books look more interesting, and I thought I could put together a star chart to reward him for reading each book.

Have others found Reading Chest helpful? Is there anything similar that we could try?

We do make use of the library but it is much more geared to the sort of books that I read to him, rather than those he can try himself.

We've found it very good, mainly as the school books are rubbish. Have been using it all year. They send you a star chart. And the little stickers.

We subscribed for a while and didn't find it as good as we hoped. The books were as dull as the ones ds got home from school.

We found he did more reading when we went to the library and chose books there together. Ours had a whole section of early reader style books and some very simple non-fiction too, which really caught his attention.

Ours also runs a Summer Reading Challenge, where, if they read 6 library books over the summer, getting a sticker on their card for each one, they get a certificate and a prize at the end of the summer.

This really motivated ds to have a go.

It was also completely free

I would just join the library and read together for fun.

At that stage I'd be inclined to buy a set from The Book People as suggested. We use the RC but I'm considering stopping the subscription as I think their service is going downhill - the turnaround time to get new books seems to be getting slower and slower so I'm getting less and less books for my subscription.

Thanks for your thoughts everyone. I think maybe I am getting carried away with thinking that it's DS' school's fault that his reading books are so uninspiring. They seem very very old and I thought perhaps the newer ones would be better.

Whereas maybe it's just a fact that early reading books tend to be dull as a 'by product' of being simple....

What is he interested in? You can get Spiderman and Lego early readers on Amazon. It is not a very cost effective way of doing it but they did get my ds's attention.

I really do think you will be surprised if you spend a bit of time hunting in your library. Have a good look at the non fiction as schools often overlook this area and it is often what they are examined on in secondary school. I know that is a long way off but if you build up a love for the genre...

any of this of interest to him?

Thank you for the links carrots, they look great. I will also have a proper look at our local library, and perhaps a few others nearby- I may have misjudged them.

There's a book on Carrot's link called The Horse In Harrys room, it's about a boy who's imaginary friend is a horse, lovely story, always makes me want to cry.

Google Oxford owl. They have lots of reading scheme books on there that you can read online. My ds loves Peoject X books.

We did the reading chest as I wanted to see whether ds could cope with differing sorts of texts at the same level. In reception ds was an able but reluctant reader. School did ORT and Storyworlds which were ok but not too inspiring. Reading Chest gave a wider variety of texts at each level including factual books which ds really enjoyed. I think this definitely helped to spur him to pick up books at home/the library by himself (mostly simple factual books like the Guinness Book of records, car books, body fact books etc) and then he moved onto comics and is now reading Capt underpants, simple roald dahl, horrid henry etc completely unprompted most of the time (which is a miracle believe me!!).
However it is fairly expensive and I would also second the library.