Those whose children read early

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My 4 year old is an advanced reader, his head teacher tested his reading age a few months back which came back as 8.1 years.
He seems to be progressing fast and although that's great, I am finding it hard to find books with appropriate content.

He brings home a Read Write Inc and an Oxford Reading Tree book twice a week and at home loves his fact books on space, dinosaurs, human body etc but he is wanting to start reading chapter books.

Are there any you can recommend which will be suitable for a sensitive 4 year old but also be at a challenging level?
At the moment his school books aren't challenging him at all.

TIA

This is the book my son could read had memorised before he was 2. My OH bought it before our first holiday abroad when DS1 was 2 and 3/4 and DS2 was 1 and 3/4. By the time we went on holiday DS2 would "read" the book out to everyone - totally word perfect. OH gave the book away in one of his clearouts, DSs are now coming up 15 and 14 and i'd been raking for a copy of it for ages but couldn't quite remember the title - found it on Amazon recently, bought it and hid it - makes me cry to have my cuddly babies back everytime I bring it out and read it :(

My dd is five and a confident reader. The books school sends home are basic and quite dull. So we read a longer book in parallel to books provided by school. Dd actually enjoys this more and we take turns to read. Recently we've enjoyed the bullerby children, Charlie and the chocolate factory, pippi longstocking and flat Stanley, all of which were books I loved in my own seventies childhood.

I would concur with many of the above recommendations. Libraries are fab with a child who goes through a book a night. However, I do find DS is happy to reread and reread the same books.

I frequent charity shops which enables us to have a variety of books in the house. It's sometimes hard to guess what might be their taste - there are so many more options now.

We found that the topics were less of an issue in books where they had interesting page layouts (esp when transferring from non-picture books in Yr R) - think Clumsies series.

You have to get it for him, Wailywailywaily! It must mean so much more than just a good story to him. He'll probably keep it forever and even try to interest his own children in it.

I've just ordered the Faraway Tree collection for DS (also 4). He read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory a couple of times and he started Esio Trot and George's Marvellous Medicine but they made him too fraught .
The past two nights he's read Farmer Joe and The Music Show and The Great Balloon Hullabaloo. Not chapter books but ones that keep him amused.

I was an early reader too and loved Enid Blyton so I'm hoping he'll enjoy her work as well.

CalpolOnToast DS(4) started reading before the age of two. I know it's incredible but it was sight reading and he really has come up with his own method from what I can work out. He has a really good memory could recite whole paragraphs before he was reading them (such as the list of stops on a train journey) but now he uses phonics for new words I think. I have always read to him and I think that's all you can do, I would hate for him to be pushed and not like reading as a result.
He's at nursery atm so I have no idea what his reading age is.

Depends what you mean by "challenging". At this age I think it needs to appeal to them rather than challenging - just reading a whole chapter book with few pictures is enough of a challenge in itself, and he is bound to come across words he doesn't know in the many hundreds in a chapter book.

Mr Majeika, Flat Stanley, Daisy (Kes Gray) and Claude books are all funny and non-threatening. Yes, Daisy books are about a girl but they are gender neutral IMO, and very funny. If he likes animals, try The owl who was afraid of the dark (and there are others in the series, but they are tedious). If he is into football or cars there are loads of dubious quality football fiction books, or Car Mad Jack in the library.

Also get a box set of Roald Dahl from Book People and start him off on the Magic Finger and some of the other shorter books.

ricky rockets are early chapter books.

try the switch books by ali sparks. quite short and about insects and lizards.

mr majeika

flat stanley, (harder than mr majeika)

the sheep pig, the hodge heg (dick king smith) the wombles, paddington

secret seven

Dd is in reception and has just completed ks1 read, write, inc.

She loves dinosaurs, space, human body etc. She has some hand me down childrens encyclopedias which hit the spot. The mcbusted boys books always go down well, The Dinosaur that pooped Christmas/a planet, Aliens in underpants series, Roald Dahl, Mr Men, Winnie the Pooh, Julia Donaldson, Dick King Smith.

Dd's school allow her to go to their library and choose her own books, would that be an option?

I asked this question earlier this year for my DD because I was having the same problem with her. She really couldn't handle any threat at all... Perhaps if you search you can find that as it had lots of suggestions. She's Y1 but perhaps some of our strategies will work.

We've mainly been focusing on poetry and non fiction as a way around the issue. She loves the night mail (she can recite most of it) and we have a wonderful compilation of Please Mrs Butler and other books of poetry by the same man. AA Milne's poems and a child's garden of verse are also good.

On the non fiction front she love's the Usbourne 'look inside' books. But she's also read chunks of grown up nonfiction, with some support from the vocab front (Get hold of a decent children's dictionary if you go this route, and teach them to use it as soon as possible or you'll never have any free time because you'll be forever answer 'what does x mean' questions). So we've read bits of David Attenborough's Life of Mammals (she was interested in Platypuses) and Chris Hadfield's autobiography (she's space mad). We also have a decent atlas and a similar book on astronomy that she spends ages with.

Her current obsession is ReadingEggspress (login through school) which I am encouraging because of it's emphasis on comprehension rather than just decoding. And she loves earning eggs so she can furnish her apartment which currently overlooks the Acropolis (sp?) because her reading book from school is about greek mythology!

Hold everything! I was recommended the Project X Alien Adventures by someone on another forum and found this bargain. I ordered them for DS4 and he LOVES them. Seriously, he cannot get enough of them and is going through them 3 a day. The Fact File that comes with the books is full of great info too.

Thanks for this Cunk. I'm not sure my 6 year old would pick up The Screams of Raptiss or Attack of the Giant anything.

It really bugs me that the "scary sounding stuff" has to start so early for boys. Or is it peril-free in reality? DS won't touch Beast Quest because the covers are too scary.

DS absolutely loves the project x books I got him, BUT if you have got the same pack (book band turquoise to lime pack) you will find that the story doesn't end there and to get a happy ending you need to buy the brown band ones too (12 books) at 5 pounds each

blink I completely agree, the scary stuff starts way too soon. DS4 can't watch Noddy or Peter Rabbit on cBeebies because they frighten him!

They are very good v bad based but not have some twists and contain some little twists (such as the Buzzles not being bad at all). Could you ask at school if you could borrow a few to try before buying?

gymnastic, now I didn't want to hear that! £5 a book? Damn it. Maybe there are some other offers somewhere or I could borrow them from DS' school when he starts reception.

Hello, DS2 (4.5 and in preschool) is picking up reading fast, and I've had a couple of comments recently from other parents about how far ahead he is for his age - he's roughly Oxford Reading Tree level 4 or so, not as advanced as some of the other children on this thread I realise. He really enjoys it and I have plenty of books he likes - he is particularly keen on some of the Dr Seuss though they vary hugely in difficulty, Green Eggs and Ham is one of the easier ones.

My question - do early readers tend to 'level out' or do they stay good at reading / English generally when they get older? Just curious really, would be nice to know if this is his 'thing'.

I think they do tend to conserve an advantage. The size of that advantage depends on the child though.

DD - reading fluently at 3 (we don't when she started deciphering words phonetically; by the time we realised what she was doing she could already read quite well!). Reading age in at least double figures by school entry. Has always been a prolific and extremely fast reader, and a talented writer, and still clearly ahead of her age group at 14.

DS - reading simple phonetic material and first reading books at 2-3, independent reader at 5. Likes reading but not fast or especially profilic. Always good at reading comprehension at school, less so at writing. In the top 2-3% in his year at school (Y8), so still "ahead", but within the normal range (it's not a selective school - I would say he is very able but no more so than the top few kids in any year, most of whom won't have been reading at 3).

My question - do early readers tend to 'level out' or do they stay good at reading / English generally when they get older? Just curious really, would be nice to know if this is his 'thing'.

In my case it was a sign of being generally bright, rather than particularly English being my "thing". I was good at all academics, and I still love reading, but maths was my thing.

Interesting thanks. What I find quite fascinating is seeing his thought process as he figures out works. If he can't read it straight away he tests out all the different permutations and different possible pronunciations until he gets it right. Must say something about logic / problem solving skills.

Well for now just enjoying it and encouraging him. I was pretty bookish as a child so I think he may have picked up a few of my genes; I still enjoy words and writing now.

Jenny dale's puppy tales, kitten tales, etc etc Don't buy them though as they will be read, enjoyed and discarded within a nanosecond.