Weird school report?

[sambaba]

DD, just turned 5, has been able to read since 2. She can now read for example Harry Potter. She will ask about and respond to punctuation in text. Comprehension is amazing.
She started school this Sep and her first school report says underachieving for language and communication.
Both her nurseries identified her language was very advanced.
For context DH and I are both teachers and were also both GAT at literacy.
Is this a bit odd? I don't really plan on saying anything but I'm just a bit baffled.
It's two form entry and there are a lot of challenging kids I think including one whose been a bit violent at time, I suspect she's a gentle soul and doesn't say much.

My best friend in primary school was an avid reader, I remember her reading Harry Potter certainly before 8 years old. Reading was just her thing and sounds like it’s your daughters too. She wasn’t hyperlexic or ND or anything else she just genuinely loved to read.
I know nothing about primary education but I’d say just speak to the teacher see if it’s a mistake on her report or maybe something else.

I personally would have a conversation with the teacher. They've decided her communication and language is behind for a reason and just have a discussion to see what they believe. The fact is is excellent at reading is different to communication and language. In EYFS the reading would be in literacy, word reading area of development which is a totally different area to communication and language. MN don't know your child so people are just trying to help a conversation with the teacher may help you understand how she is developing at school and what the teachers concerns are. It's hard being a teacher and a parent (my husband and I both are too), but you've to take the teacher hat off and just get the perspective of he teacher and her experience at school. I hope it goes well.

What does "GAT at literacy" mean?

My DD (16 now) is very shy and reserved and no teachers picked up on it until an award ceremony where one award was for the person who got the highest marks in year 11 mocks. They never saw it coming, and she achieved 12 x grade 9! Now at same school (6th form) they definitely know who she is. Difficult for teachers when kids don’t offer answers like my DD but your DD is so young still. I’d be asking them about it for sure.

Gifted and talented.

The first few 3 Harry Potter books have a reading age of 8+ so someone reading at 6/7 would be strong reader but not outside the bounds of normal. It is very unusual to be able to read and comprehend the early books at 5.

I hold that you would not get a 7 year old able to properly comprehend the themes in the later books - no because of reading ability but because they are too mature/complex for a 7 year old. If your friend was reading these at 7 she did not fully understand them. Lots of 7 year olds could read the words, doesn't mean they comprehend. Note by 'lots' I mean lots of 7 year olds with strong reading ability - it wouldn't be the norm.

That said, I think OP means Book 1!

This.

DD had a reading ability akin to your child OP. Her communication skills with adults were good, almost precocious, but her communication. with her peers not so much - she grew into that. It wasn't apparent to me as she was with children she knew well when with me. Is this what the teacher is observing? I expect you will say no as from reading your response to comments on your OP, I think you were hoping for an echo chamber.

On HP, not appropriate for a child your DDs age - give your head a wobble. That it is your rationale that your DD saw you reading it on your kindle and asked to read it to with you makes this no better. You are the parent here, if you hadn't been reading an (older) children's book as an adult () but an adult book, you wouldn't even have contemplated having her read what you were reading. Next time she interrupts your reading, maybe see it as the social cue it is - that she'd like to interact with you and perhaps you can flex what you are doing to accommodate her needs in an age appropriate way.

Finally, to suggest you can assess or not for ND / SEN in a 5 year old girl because you have an undergraduate psychology degree and DH is SENCO is a joke. Neither of you are anywhere near qualified and quite a lot of SENCOs are shocking at missing or diverting attention away from ND assessment of girls. I'm not saying your DD is ND etc, I'm saying you are arrogant to make the assumptions about your abilities in this regard.

You and your DH are more than qualified to have a discussion with your DD's teacher as to the meaning of the report. Why are you asking on here? It's interesting that your DD is so advanced in reading. Did you just want to share?

Sounds like they ticked the wrong box or pasted in the wrong child's information into their report. I'd ask them.

BTW my 5 year old read, understood and loved HP. Not autistic, not hyperlexic, just loves reading and can easily understand the themes/imagine the story progression. Keeping goblet of fire onwards until she's a bit older as the books get darker in tone.

Your child probably isn't as good at comprehension as you think she is. She might be good at memorising words and guessing but can't pronounce/sound out new words. Maybe she struggles with communicating with peers at school.

Best thing to do is ask. As a teacher,
i’m sure you know that it could be to do with they way they assess. They may only use certain pieces of work to inform data and it might not be as holistic as it should be.

It could be that if they were assessing a certain text and on that day her inferences/ comprehension were weaker than with another text in a different day. There’s a myriad of things it could be and you’ll only know if you ask.

I was hyperlexic, reading before 2, writing stories from 5 or 6, excellent comprehension, yada yada, and most of HP would have gone right over my head at 5. 'Doing reading comprehension' (which presumably involves asking specific questions) is not the same as engaging meaningfully with a book and its themes.

@crummygecko i honestly couldn’t tell you if she could comprehend the books or not or even what Harry Potter books it was but I can say she was enthralled in them and enjoyed reading them.
I really wish I had that passion for reading, I’m yet to find it.

But you ARE making a big deal of it. Being teachers does not exclude you from being ‘that parent’. You clearly think you have a genius child because you taught her to read at 2 yers old and she reads Harry Potter books (which are most certainly not age appropriate). I bet she’s bored witless in school seeing as a lot of the learning in Reception is focussed on acquiring phonics skills.
Just speak to the class teacher and ask them to explain the L+C aspect of her learning.

My DS1 was also marked all the way through primary as requiring improvement in language & communication etc. We found this incredibly frustrating as at home would spout the most ridiculous things, such as at 5 declaring that his little brother was aggravating him and he talked non stop. He read excellently to a level 2 years above etc. However, Teachers constantly referenced the need to speak up more in class etc.

This continued all the way through primary. He's now in his first year at senior and has just received a report full of excellents with noted praise for his wonderful communication and understanding and his ability to put his points across well in discussion.

We spoke to him about how well he was doing and how proud we are.. but couldn't help asking ( very nicely) what the change was.

He told is that one of his earliest memories from school was a child sat near him answering a question in class. They got it wrong and some of the children laughed nastily. He had just never wanted to speak up in class in case they laughed. When he moved to senior, he went without a lot of his year group and with that went the fear.

I feel dreadful now that I didn't stop and ask him when he was younger about this. Of course we asked the 'is there anything worrying you?' Questions, but I guess he assumed we meant bullying. He was never bullied, he just didn't want to get something wrong and be laughed at.

You are just at the start of her journey. It's wonderful she feels comfortable to express herself at home. Fantastic she wants to explore reading and lovely she has a thirst for more... but maybe she's just not ready to showcase that to others yet. She'll get there soon enough!

Good luck OP, it sounds like you have a lovely, well supported child.

It’s not so much that they couldn’t read and understand Harry Potter at 5 (I’m sure my child could), it’s that posters are doubting whether or not Harry Potter is an appropriate book choice for a 5yo. I’d personally have to agree with them that it’s not. If anything their excellent comprehension of a book like Harry Potter might be even more problematic given what the book is about.

EYFS and KS1 specialist here (with 20 plus years of experience!) and @Winterwellies has it. There are two umbrella elements to Communication and Language in the EYFS Framework, below. Reading has its own Early Learning Goal. If your DD got ‘emerging’, (rather than working below- the language counts here as it is official national levelling) it just means she’s on track to be where she needs to be at the end of Reception (‘Expected’) EYFS reporting no longer includes exceeding/ beyond expected) when officially reported to the council, but many schools use ‘exceeding’ in their internal assessment procedures. Pupils need to demonstrate the below, consistently, to be levelled at ‘expected’ at the end of Reception.

C&L:
ELG: Listening, Attention and Understanding
Children at the expected level of development will:

• Listen attentively and respond to what they hear with relevant questions, comments and actions when being read to and during whole class discussions and small group interactions;
• Make comments about what they have heard and ask questions to clarify their understanding;
• Hold conversation when engaged in back-and-forth exchanges with their teacher and peers.

ELG: Speaking Children at the expected level of development will:

• Participate in small group, class and one-to-one discussions, offering their own ideas, using recently introduced vocabulary;
• Offer explanations for why things might happen, making use of recently introduced vocabulary from stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems when appropriate;
• Express their ideas and feelings about their experiences using full sentences, including use of past, present and future tenses and making use of conjunctions, with modelling and support from their teacher.

This. Not so much the inappropriatness but lack of experience.

My son, now mid 30s, sounds similar to your child. He taught himself punctuation in Y1 and his teacher was ‘gobsmacked’ by this.

We are also both teachers and usually both went to primary school parents’ evenings. Fortunately few issues - we got on well with staff who were usually flexible. We did ask that he jump books in reading scheme to get to more appropriate levels. He’d read some upside down as he was bored.

How your DD gets on socially out of your sight might be interesting and useful to ask about.

At secondary school, which was also my workplace, my DW did parents’ evenings. He had like minded friends and after a bit of pushing they were catered for.

Looking back at GCSE time he and his friends could do them with eyes closed. A levels maybe a different matter. Should we have pushed more? Would he have ended up with mh issues?

Could be an error. Ds1, age 7, once got “struggling with” when he should have got “his level interest and knowledge in the subject is impressive and often irritating”. Or whatever the codes words for that were.

He spent a whole half term getting really stressed about it. When he asked the teacher what the matter was she apologised said she’d clicked the wrong button.

I’d be suspecting that this is a mistake-that they have confused names, or something. I’d make an appointment to discuss it.
edited to say-I made a mistake in a report this November by clicking Emerging instead of Excellent. Luckily I read through before they went out. My son had the bottom numerical grade for science one year-a 5-because the teacher came from a school where 5 was top and 1 was bottom.

I found out the hard way that what my child did at home wasn’t what she did at school. When I went into school to help with reading she couldn’t do it due to anxiety. It was like a different child. You say she is reserved but it could be more than that op. I would speak to the teacher then you will have more idea. Plus she has had only a term of school it takes a while for children to settle. I think Harry Potter are quite full on stories and aimed at late primary onwards, they could be scary to a 5 year old.

From my experience with my own children, reading and communication are 2 different things in schools.

My children read at a higher level than their peers. In both, I was told they had communication problems, despite being confident and both having extensive vocabulary.

Both were requested to go to speech therapy for different reasons. In my son's case, he had so many ideas he rushed his speech, so it wasn't as clear as they'd have expected at his age. With my daughter, I believe it was part of her ASD diagnosis.

If they ever had assessments I wasn't clear about, I asked for further information. I never took offence because I believed (and I was right) that they had my children's best interests at heart.

OP, I would simply ask the school rather than post with strangers. We don't know your child. Your school does.

In any outcome, as you know, children develop different skills at different times. Don't fret as long as your child is supported in every way

I think the reading is a red herring. I have a child who is also a very good reader. She is also very reserved when putting her had up in class. Her teachers, thankfully when they spend 1 to 1 time with her recognize that she is knowledgeable and has great language skills. This also comes through in her writing. But if the teacher is going on class discussion from 1 term, her language and communication skills might not be evident to them yet. I would pick up with the teacher on what was meant by the comment, and if need be encouraged your child to speak up in class.

As an ex teacher, why do you care?!

Reports don’t change outcomes in any way. And a first term report on a 5 year old? The teacher is still getting to know them. Most teachers hate report writing and the sole purpose is to engage the parents with their child’s education so the school and parents can work together to achieve an optimal outcome. As you and your husband seem abundantly qualified to support your daughter, the effect of the report will be precisely zero.

If you are concerned about her teaching and whether she is being appropriately challenged, that is another conversation that you need to have with the school.