Reading again ( sorry)

[Wheresmycaffeinedrip]

my dd is in reception. To start with she was really excited about learning to read and was dying to do her books as soon as we got home. These days however is a different story. She is slowly loosing interest in the books and is getting very bored very quickly she is just not finding them interesting at all. She isn't struggling at all with them so that's not the problem. Give or take one or two words she's not really having trouble with them at all and when I can finally get her to read them
Properly she can read them pretty quickly. My question is how do I motivate her to read the books she's being given and do I speak to the teacher about it or just continue reading our books along side and hope that ot clicks that if she just does them then the rest of the day is hers to read or play with what she likes? TIA

Definitely tell the teacher, she should be reading books that interest and challenge her.

Thank you fallen! My dp seems to think that pushing her ahead Is gonna mean that she will get to a point where the teacher won't know what to do and she will become bored and disruptive!??? I very much doubt that will happen I just don't think she's gonna progress as well as she could if she's not paying attention due to boredom :(

I think you should mention it to the teacher,but id think the teacher also listens to her read and will be aware too of just where her reading is at.

Reading is more than the words,its about expression,the way the word id written and then retold,the way the child recognises and sounds out the word- for me when a child reads to me to hear 'Biff.....errrr......saw...the...m...a..gic key' and the same child a day or 2 later reads in an excited tone 'biff saw the magis key' and giggles because they know whats coming and they are quick to find out the look on floppys face etc -tells me they 'get' the story they read the words but 'get' the story.

Im not saying your dd isnt getting the storyline and i know school books can be boring for children but just wanted to point out the difference and it could be that is what the teacher is looking for.

Glad you do reading at home with different books though.

She does understand the books she points at things and she knows what's coming trouble is she basically just reads it once or twice then just remembers it. She doesn't errr or um at all she just sits there half heartedly reading it playing with her feet. :)

Have you tried giving her the words out of context as flashcards, to see if she's memorised them or is actually reading them?

Some of the books have a table at the front with words in and she will read them from there quite happily. I also cover the pages and pictures up and get her to read words in their own that way

She is also desperate for new words but the TA said before they broke up that until they have covered the new sounds in class that they won't be getting any.

Cover the new words on your own. Don't let her interest in reading wane.

We were meant to reread books - Ds had absolutely no interest in this whatsoever so we read something else instead. He thought the same about 'retelling a tale' in 'big write' in Year one - he wasn't interested in retelling a story that he'd already read and talked about - he wanted to write something different - luckily he can in Yr2. In reception we found the Apple Tree Farm books good - to start with simple phrase for child at the top - but they can start to read some of the rest of it too or take a page each etc.

Thank you all :) I do try to obviously discuss the book and the punctuation but it's a vicious circle really as she's not gonna do that on books she's not interested in but may not get new ones if she xant show she knows it. Have tried explaining this obviously but it never seems to sink in. Normally a little bribery works but this weekend she was in tears at being made to do them. I do try and teach her new sounds To cover words in other books but now there's all this action -nonsense stuff she still has to relearn it at school. I don't wanna push her so far that she's missing chunks of vital work but I can't force her to care about biff and chip either :(

Can you move away from the reading books and get her some books for home that she does want to read? We read every night with DS but its rarely the reading scheme book (although for different reasons)

You don't need biff, chip or school books to teach punctuation, reading sounds or any of the rest of it. And it's more important to make it fun than anything else. A question mark is still a question mark even if it's written on the kitchen table in chocolate sauce.

That's pretty much what I figured learnandsay and I been doing that with other books and even road signs :) and when shes reading a book she's enjoying she will sit there and point out the capital letters and tell me what a full stop is and tell that there's a question mark and with words like want she will tell me what the letters are and how to sound it out then tell me that it's not said like w-a-n-t we say want. But with the school books sometimes she is just bored and she deliberately makes mistakes on words she's known for months just to get of doing it ( she has told me this and it is confirmed by the fact she will happily read the same word several tines in the book but when she's bored she just miraculously looses the ability to " remember" what it is) :( just hard to know what to do for the best. I don't wanna make her hate reading by forcing her to so books she doesn't want to but I can't let her get away with the deliberate difficult behavior either :(

Well, my daughter messes around too for lots of reasons, tired, not motivated, yada, yada. I use a range of strategies from giving up temporarily and switching on the TV, through bribery and so on. I'm sure most mums do. On the whole she reads beautifully, she can read the whole of Where the Wild Things Are and forty pages of Green Eggs and Ham. She's even reading poetry now and doesn't understand many of the words! But she's sounding out like a trouper, followed by an endless string of what does that mean, mummy! (If I didn't know that children were being taught to sound out strange words we wouldn't be doing this! Personally I think uttering unknown words is a bit silly. But my daughter seems happy enough.)

But the upshot is that she has receptive phases when she'll read two or three quite long poems that she doesn't understand and she'll have other phases where she assures me that she doesn't know what the word "what" says. Of course she does and I know that she does. But I don't force it out of her. We have a routine for sounding out words and if she isn't willing to use it, as long as she has read satisfactorily up to that stage then she gets to watch TV or play Lego. The last thing I want to do is fight about reading.

I use bribery quite alot reading with a bowl of apple slices usually works. I have noticed that over the weeks it has been getting slightly harder and harder to persuade her to do them but the weekend was the worst. Ive usually managed to tell her off for deliberately being difficult then left it a few mons and then she will do them properly but this weekend this just didn't happen. She didn't want to look at them at all ( homework diary had said she had made a good start in class) And it just upset and shocked me the way she just wasn't prepared to do even a page with the prospect of playing a game of her choice after. She does better with books about bugs or animals so guess I'll just have to hope that the next ones are more to her taste and then speak to her teacher if the same thing happens again :(

We had a year (yr 1) of getting the most unbelievably boring books ever - mostly very out of date. Apparently ds was more interested in factual books according to his teachers (news to me - he liked anything that was interesting at home whether fiction or non fiction) so was getting things like books on different types of houses, or computers (from the '90s so really out of date). The Year1 teacher wouldn't listen to us regarding his reading etc - so we gave up trying to change the school reading and just made sure that we had plenty of interesting things to read at home. Even on the school run, reading posters in shop windows, the name of shops, advertisements on buses etc is really useful and more like a game than sitting down and 'reading'.

Hmmm, we generally only read books once. Is there any need to do it more than once if the child can read it and understand it? (unless they want to of course!).

And we covered some new sounds ourselves, first through some phonics books, then just via normal reading scheme books. I was a bit reluctant to do this at first, and as you say get ahead of the phonics they have covered in class, but DS picked it up very quickly and was trying to read much harder things himself anyway. So..I didn't want to hold him back, and he has not been. Luckily his teacher has recognized now that his reading is much further on than others and is giving him suitable books. I would not want any fight or tears though. I would quit all reading and re think if that happened.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one whis had this problem. I was starting to think I had done something wrong in order to not be able to get my dd to read a school book. It's just so hard isn't it! If they don't read them then teachers not gonna know what stage they are at but make them read books that don't interest them ( when they r too young to grasp the importance of doing so) and u run the risk of making them dislike reading. :(

I think kids are smart enough to distinguish between not liking books and not liking this particular book. But if teachers keep giving them books they don't like then that will probably cause difficulties.

Fingers crossed she has a new one today! One she is more interested in reading :)

I would have a word with the teacher. They normally have a variety of books within each reading level so they may be able to give your DD a different sort of book to see if she is more interested in them. If your DD can read the book easily and understand it, I would probably only read it through once if she is getting bored with it. Maybe just go back through the words she struggled with. My DS used to get new books every day, otherwise he just learnt them off by heart.

Also get different books from the library. Also you can get some good deals on children's books from places like The Book People. I always wrote in DS's reading diary which books he had read, not just the ones from school.

Another thing I did when I was reading to DS was if I could see a sentence in the book that he could read, I got him to read it and he was very excited that he could read a "proper" book.

My DS was also motivated by the prospect of being a "free reader" and knew that he had to read many school books to get there

They seem to be doing a mix of ORT , the ORT song birds, and rigby star. She definately not really enjoying the ' sid' rigby books and everytime she gets new one that seems a bit more challenging it gets changed to another book say ORT it's easier than the rigby even though it's same band and then she bored again

I just wondered what stage she's got to? I think there's a tricky stage between phonics based and then harder books and some of the books at the early stages are pretty tedious/dull/don't make much sense to me as an adult so I can see children not enjoying them either! Then, when you get past these and reading goes up a level you get onto much more interesting stuff, also easier once your DC can manage slightly longer texts- better stories! So, hang in there and things will improve (I hope!!!).

Oh yes, I hesitate to mention it as I keep saying it on MN and people don't appreciate it, BUT.... remember in lots of countries they don't start teaching children to read until 6 or 7 and there's a reason for that (concentration, readiness to do it, speed of progress is quicker etc etc.)