Straw poll - what reading level is your year one child on?

[lisalisa]

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no kids in year 1 but dd was on level 10/11 ORT and ds was on level 5/6 ORT

My ds3 is in Year 1 and to be honest I have no idea what reading level he is on and I can't say I'm really bothered!
I do know that he has really good phonemic awareness and can hear the sounds in words and I work on that with him rather than worrying about how many books he can get through.
I wouldn't worry too much about what levels other children in your ds's class are on. As long as he doesn't have any real problems he will catch up eventually.

agree with wordgirl - dont worry about stages and where your child is - they all generally leave school being able to read, if not it is usually picked up. My children are now yr 7 and yr 3

My DD is in year 1 (6 in Feb) but her school uses the Oxford Reading Tree books so I don't know how they relate. Happy to chat about year one stuff generally if you like.

My dd is in Year 2 and is one of the youngest in her class. She is on Level 4 on the Ginn system which is about average in her class. I must say as well she has only really progressed with reading etc since she started Year 2. A year ago my dh & I were in despair as I really thought we were going to have to find her a tutor or something because no matter what we tried and despite her own love of books she just couldn't read. But since staring Year 2 something has just clicked and she is reading quite fluently now.

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DS has just turned 6 and is in Year 1. He is on Ginn Level 7 which is above average in his class, although there are a few girls on Level 10. However, the children with their Birthdays in the Summer term are not even started with reading until the beginning of Year 1. I'm assured that they all catch up perfectly well .

ORT = Oxford Reading Tree

Ginn books are given as home readers (as well as other books) in ds's school. The one I remember is "Stop" - frigging hated that book but will concede that it does do the repetition thing

DS is the youngest in his class (late Aug birthday!!) in Y1. The majority of his books are ORT, level 5. But the books are also colour banded and I know that his school may mark up one ORT stage 5 book as being a blue coded book, and another stage 5 as being orange. I do think that the books do vary withing the range IYSWIM.
ds's reading is coming on very nicely and I try not to worry about what level he is on, but rather encourage his enjoyment of books!
He sat down with me last night and just listened to me read him a few pages of Harry Potter!!He seemend really dissapointed thet he couldn't read it himself. He was flicking through the pages just looking, when I asked what he was doing he said he was looking for "Harry!" in the text.
I know he is now at the stage where they are just trying to encourage to increase his vocabulary, they have told him he can choose his books from the range of 2 colour bands so I am expecting the levels to change a fair bit!

Sorry lisalisa . If it helps at all, I have just looked in DS's book folder and found a Ginn Stage 2 and an ORT Stage 3. He is nearly 6.

I would gladly help, but we are ORT too. Dd is in P2, which is like year 1 but the children are going to be about 6 months older than English Year 1 on average. She finished stage 9 earlier this term and moved on to "real" books- she's in about the top 20% of the class I would say. The spread in her class is huge though- I haven't helped in the class this year, but at the end of last year some of them had yet to start bringing reading books home properly whilst others were already on stage 8.

I haven't seen your other thread, sorry- it sounds like quite a tough decision. FWIW I could have kept ds back a year when he first started school and now, years later, wish I had.

Blimey, you lot have got me worried now

My DS's are in year 1, and are level 5 ORT, about to start 6 when they go back to school.
I think they are about average in their class, I know of some of their friends who are higher, but I don't want to put too much preasure on them, I'd rather they just enjoyed reading.
However, I have noticed that recently they seem to have "clicked" with the word recognition, and seem to remember far more words.
On the weekend DS sat down and read a book of fairy stories, and was able to read most of it by himself.I think it's only just dawned on him, he can now read whatever he wants, not just his school readers.

DD1 in year 2 finished the ginn reading book scheme in the middle of year 1 and has been reading normal books ever since.

this is the link to the Oxford Reading Tree site

Their 'treetops' books - stages 10-16 take children from a reading age of 8 yrs to 11 yrs 6 months. (There is a link at the bottom to an Acrobat file giving approximate reading ages for ORT stages).

I listen to yr4 readers in our school, and I would say the 'average child' is on stage 13 - i.e. as recommended by OUP. But of course the range of abilities is very wide (and is wider in yr4 than in yr1), so there are some very, very able readers, and some on lower levels.

I don't know how closely (or whether) ORT stages correspond to Ginn stages though lisalisa.

I've no idea what level dd is on. Her reading books seem to be different 'colour' levels. I did ask once when she was in reception what level the colours indicated and where she was in relation to the rest of the class. I never really got a straight answer and I think it may be because the school is a bit coy about who is where with it all; quite why I don't know.

I've always intended to ask again to clear this up in my mind, because even though dd has just gone up a colour level, it doesn't really tell me where she is with it all iyswim.

Having said all that, I am very happy with her progress and her teacher seems to be too. Don't think they follow the Ghinn system you mention - I haven't heard of it before. I think the structure needs to be explained a little better to me though.

Our school's like that TinyGang - they use all sort of different schemes, grouped together into their own 'colour bands': red -> red star -> orange -> orange star, etc!

I think the point of it is to try and avoid conversations ... well, rather like this thread really ... at the school gate with competitive mums!

After all the main thing is that your child is reading at an appropriate level for him/her at the time, so that they are generally successful at reading, but are being challenged sufficiently to be learning/progressing too, but not too hard that they find reading to be daunting struggle.

The 'competitive mums' bit was not directed at anyone on here btw, just some that I have met in RL at the school gate!

(The colours strategy doesn't actually work ... though sometimes it takes people a little while to catch on to the system!)

Just for your interest...

A lot of schools have more than one type of reading scheme running along side each other, to add interest and to cater for different tastes and styles (some focus on whole word approaches, some are designed to promote phonetics etc etc). The levels of different published schemes (eg Ginn ORT Rigby Star) don't usually correlate, so many schools use the 'Cliff Moon' colour-coding system - a big book that lists all the different reading scheme titles, and lots of 'real' books and puts them into colour bands of difficulty/readability.

Some schools prefer to stick to one scheme which is rigidly applied to with children only going up a level once they can read all the words of the books out of context. Other schools use a mixed approach giving children a range of books, some which they can read easily for confidence, with others mixed in which require more hard work. Some schools follow a more phonetic approach, using texts that mainly have words that can be sounded out, sending those books home once the child knows the relevant sounds.

It makes it difficult to compare between schools, as different approaches will see Y1 children doing a lot of different things. HTH

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my dd`s school uses loads of different reading schemes. she recently finished oxford reading tree level 5. she isnt 6 for almost another 3 months.