Reception reading books too hard!

[paintingonthewall]

My dd has just started reception and is enjoying it a lot. She has an older brother in year 2 so learnt her letter sounds sort of via him and can read CVC words no problem. She has now been put onto the next level books and now has 2 ORT stage 3 books which I think are really hard. I had the opposite with my ds who seemed to crawl through the book bands. Should i just work through the books with my dd. They are each 16 pages long and full of words with sounds she hasn't learnt yet?

Can you write in her home school book that she's finding the books too hard? Or maybe they're meant for shared reading so she can pick out words she does know and you can read the rest?

Does she enjoy reading them and is coping with them easily?

Not all children need to work through phonics systematically for learning to read, only for writing. For reading, many quickly move on to the more advanced stage - learning to read all common words as whole words by sight.

Yes, that is a great idea of her reading the words she can manage. She has memorised some of one of them, but they are so long i think it will be really hard for her to learn both. My ds is an exceptional reader and reading came really easy to him so i don't know if they are basing what they give my dd on him.

Ok trouble is that the school (and you) are correctly teaching her via phonics, but then sending home non decodeabe ORT books ( assuming you mean the classic ORT books)

There really is no answer to this. She should not be getting these books. She won't be able to read them using her phonics knowledge. :(

So school are expecting her to look at the pictures and guess :( Which you quite rightly don't want to teach her to do.

I think I'd just read the books 'with' her. ie get her to read the words she can read, and you read the others.

Yes they are classic ORT! Great tips thank you. My ds had the same books but somehow managed to learn to read but i can't really remember how!

I always took the line with dd1 that if she struggled with a word, I'd read it for her - she often recognized it the second time that way anyway. Its not meant to be a battle, its meant to be fun

Just started the same journey with dd2, who currently can recognize her CVC words but refuses to read the same words in a book on the grounds that 'its too hard, there are too many words all together'

Elibean - it is harder to read words in a sentence than on a flashcard.

It requires far more sophisticated control of your eyes.

I assume your DD is in reception, and so it is not a problem yet. But if this continued into Y1 I'd be checking to see that she doesn't have any eye tracking or similar problems.

(ie if she continued to find it far easier to read words on flashcards as compared to words in a sentence)

Learning phonics at school and getting classic ORT books to read at home is a very common and very unfortunate scenario. When my son was in the same situation in his reception year and was really struggling, I signed up for the Reading Chest and got him appropriate level decoders. It worked.