Could the average Reception age child read this passage?

[Avocadoes]

"I want to go to Lily's party. I will go on the bus, then I will walk. There will be cake and lots of fun. Do you want to come too?"

My DD is nearly 4 and a half and her reading has just been assessed (by school) using the passage above.

I am just interested in whether most Reception kids would be able to read all the words in that passage and do so without halting to figure out each individual word.

Remember too, that children are vastly different ages in Yr R. My DD2 is in Yr 1 now, but is only 5.3, just two weeks older than the oldest Yr R child.

Mine would definitely not

DS would have easily have read this by Xmas in reception - fluently I suspect, but DD would have been struggling in Yr 1. Anyway, many years on she is a very keen and capable reader

Fortunately for me DD is the eldest so it was a relief that DS 'could just do it' and we did not have a repeat for the 3 yrs of stress we had with DD!!

LAndS - missed your post about "reception"

Honestly I am not sure if she could read it but she has no problem with face, case, race etc and I have never had to tell her what they are so she has probably worked it out for herself (I can see her following the words on the page when I read her a bedtime story)

She corrects me if I try to miss bits out

ds is exactly 4 1/2 this week - he was only just reading words before 1/2 term and this week can read 'fat cat, sat on a mat, sit on a pin' type sentences.

Not a chance!

not DS1 in reception. He could now in yr2!

Don't worry if this post or that post gets missed. It's all good. I can't quite remember why now. But I did have to teach my daughter about the letter c pretending to be the letter s. We call it a bendy-K (I've no idea why I/we chose that phrase. Probably to signify the c bending to become an s.) She seems to be able to switch sounds automatically in some words but not others. Since we introduced the bendy-K it's worked out much better.

I am a reception teacher and most of those words a child of 4 should be able to read or at least sound them out as they are phonetic.

Maybe by February (when this post first started) but surely not at this stage of the year for most children - only 8 weeks in and some schools don't even start their reception children 'til 4 weeks in?

None of my class would be able to read that passage. It's stuffed full of tricky words and PGCs that we have not yet learnt. Thinking back over the past 3 years, only 1 child out of 90 who have been in my class would have been able to read that at this time of the year.

As far as

wash
wasp
want

go I did ask her to read them this morning (but I put was, which she can already read at the top of the list to get her in the right frame of mind.)

she read wa-sh, made it into wash, and then back to wa-sh again. So I told her that you wa-sh your face and of course she made it back to wash. She made was-p and didn't seem to have any idea what that word was until I asked her if she knew what a was-p was. Then she made it into wasp, and of course the other two she read without any trouble.

I think her reading might have improved slightly this morning after I turned cbeebies off but I'm not sure.

It just occurred to me, she's not at all used to being given lists of words to read out of context. (We don't do that.)

My DD2 is 4.9 and doesn't even know all her letters yet, let alone being able to read!! Reception children have only been in school half a term, so unless they've been taught to read outside school, how on earth would they know how to read yet? I'm quite impressed by how many MNer's children are reading before school. DD2's class are still all learning basic letters - S, A, T etc, and covering high-frequency words. Certainly not expected to read yet.

DD1 hardly knew any letters either when she started school, and is now above average for her age in year 3. So I'm not remotely worried - they all learn eventually.

Oh. How did this zombie thread get resurrected?

DD has had a couple of reading assessments done at school/nursery on the computer so I think she would be ok to read them...( wasp, wash etc)

She could not read wasp but read the others ok....

Personally I'm not sure what difference reading early makes. But one thing which is obvious is that if the child can read she can read. That's one less thing to worry about.

I once taught a child with a severe learning difficulty. She could read beautifully - fluently and with lots of expression. She could read quite difficult technical words.

she had absolutely no clue what she was reading. Her comprehension was extremely low. She left secondary school on approximately level 3.

Isn't that the beginning of the discussion called "it all depends upon what one means by reading?"

At this stage in reception? No!

My son is a very able reader and at this stage in reception he would have struggled with that passage. He would have been able to read it later in the year.

With my second we were vary laid back. He learnt his phonics and CVC words at school rather then before hand. He is only 4 and 3 months but a speedy learner.

Looking at the passage, I would say he would struggle with the words - 'the' (but not 'they' oddly), 'cake' and also possibly 'Lily's' maybe. He would have to sound out almost all the words though but could do so quickly.

My first would have read them all without hesitation but then he learned to read at home six months before (being the book worm he is - he was obsessed).

And just to also add, I agree you cannot gauge how bright is by how quickly they learn to read. There are so many different types of intelligence anyway, and reading is just one skill.

I'm not sure what it says about the child's intelligence but it certainly says something about the child's ability to read which is what's intended.