Is my Year 3C DS doing okay or should I get him tutor/kumon

[WineAndChocolate]

Hi all, dont come on here very often I'm afraid but I hope you dont mind me asking for some advice.

Just had parents evening and DS got a 4B in reading which I was really pleased about but his comprehension was only a 2B (although his teacher did say it was a new test and everyone in the class got a low mark in comprehension).

He is a 3C in maths. Is this okay or should I be thinking of getting him extra help?

He goes to a faith school which is very competitive and a lot of the children either have tutors or do kumon.

So the Kumon instructors don't even mark the worksheets? What is is that they charge the large sums of money for ? Is it just providing a place for children to sit and do worksheets - do they actually do any teaching as such?

Back to the question at hand about the levels.

OP, you say that your child got a 2a at the end of Year 2, nine months later he's either a 4b or a 2b. It would be highly, highly unlikely that he had jumped to a 4b in that time period, not impossible however. A 4b is an 'average' level for an 'average' child at the end of Year 6 (although reading generally is higher than writing, so an average child should be higher than this).

If your child is being graded at a 4b, they would have very good inference skills, decoding, good at above the line questioning.

At 2b, your child would be an 'average' for an 'average' Year 2 child (see brackets above, same applies), therefore in Year 3 working below where they should.

My reservations about these two grades you've been given:

1. It's ridiculous to give a level based on decoding and reading fluently. That's not reading, that's being able to perform like a parrot. I've taught children who can reading complex words and passages fluently, but don't have a clue about what the text means. Disregard levels that reflect reading like this. What is important is the comprehension level.
2. Why is there such a discrepancy? You need to speak to the school to find out how they came up with these levels.
3. How do you feel your child reads? What type of books are they into? What is the fluency and intonation like, as well as answering basic and more complex questions? Can they decode an unfamiliar word's meaning through context?

You need to get some answers about why they've given two levels for this. Have other parents had the same feedback? If it's the fact that your child can pronounce words but has no idea on meaning of the text, you and the school need to work together on rich questioning and comprehension tasks to improve this.

Having looked into Kumon for DD at one point, and going to two trial sessions I would definitely say don't bother. It is very expensive and it is death by worksheet. There was no real teaching going on, it was just repetition of worksheets over and over again, with the emphasis on recall speed rather than understanding the processes behind maths. And homework every night, granted not long, but the expectation of it being done every single day was there. And there was an expectation to turn up twice a week to do even more sheets, which were then marked by a student - all but the owner at our local one were sixth form students from what I could gather.

If you do want to go down the worksheet route of quick fire questions - such as for practising times table or number bind type stuff then you could always buy the Kumon books anyway. They seem to offer nothing less than the actual Kumon classes from what I saw and works out far cheaper.

Also with Kuon they start your child off at a VERY low level. This is apparently to make the child confident quicker and nothing to do with the fact that they quote the amazing progress each child will make in their first year at Kumon