Big cat books a lot harder than Oxford books? Levels not matching?

[Leah5678]

Hi guys my son is in year 1 on level 4 (blue) books for the big cat scheme, over the Christmas holidays we've been reading some biff and chip books and it seems level 7 biff and chip is a lot easier than level 4 big cat? Anyone else found this? When I Google reading levels it seems like big cat and Oxford are supposed to match

I agree with you they absolutely don’t match. Maybe in length and word count but the vocab is much harder in big cat Collins. The Non-fiction is a much higher level. When my daughter was reading Big Cat blue level she would take out the Orange band biff and chip magic key books from the library and read no problem . I would love a teachers opinion on this who has worked with both schemes.

level 7 is meant to be turquoise I think. I did find with my older one the gap between blue to turquoise wasn’t very big and sometimes higher banded books would be easier than lower. Once you get past a certain point it all seems a bit random.

My younger one in reception is reading two book bands higher with Oxford at home than she is with the big cat phonics at school. Some of it might depend on what the different schemes are testing. The Oxford books seem longer but with more repetition I think (assuming your biff and chip is older style) and probably more readable. I still remember my older one having a yellow banded big cat book about sheep sheering. It was so terminally dull, it was such a slog to get through it. She’d have happily read a non-fiction a few bands higher but struggled with that one. If the sheep sheering book comes back with my youngest I’ll hide it!

As a parent, I thought Big Cat books were awful and did little to capture the interests of an early reader. I also felt that some of the concepts/topics covered in the non fiction were beyond the grasp of most of their audience. I think it is so important to inspire a love of reading early on but we found the Big Cat books did the opposite. Grateful we are no longer following that reading scheme and have moved to RWI.

Completely agree - DS has Big Cat and they are much more challenging than other reading schemes, especially the non fiction (we get loads of different early readers out of the library so can directly compare).

DS only gets 1 school book a week - we read it once and then read other books the other days. He is Year 1 and on Turquoise Big Cat atm but easily reading chapter books with me.

Agree my daughter had big cat orange band “Loch ness mystery” non fiction reading assessment (without pictures) and did not move up a band because she couldn’t answer the questions. The book is terrible - words such as prominent, also very boring.

We had that sheep shearing one come home a few months back - it was so awful!! I wrote a message in the reading record saying "she really didn't enjoy this one"!!