Which 'Read at home' level is your Reception child on at this point?

[WiganKebab]

Mine is on 1+, but I wondered if there was a benchmark of roughly where she should be around now?

I've taught children who were drilled so that they were ahead of the class Cat ... usually the child tells you mummy has been teaching me the books at home or they come unstuck if not given the book mummy had taught them

Lots of things aren't "really reading", depending on what your particular view of really reading is. But that doesn't mean that they're not helpful.

Wow mrz that's just bizarre and counter intuitive - must make your job so much harder - you might think a kid can read and then realise they actually can't very well!

Oh, I see what you mean, drilled to fool the teacher. No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about simply being very familiar with some favourite books.

Oh yes l and s - we had this with the gruffalo. Perfectly normal and possibly helpful. But I don't think mrz means that!

Or maybe neither helpful nor unhelpful, who can tell? But certainly nothing particularly wrong with it. But what seems to be happening now is that my daughter is whizzing over the familiar bits of text and sounding out the more challenging words. According to a lot of people's definitions this wouldn't actually be called reading, as such. In some ways it isn't. (And in some ways of course it is.) But it's certainly a reading-like activity. And these books bear no relation to her school books.

Problem is the kids get it so wrong about their relative ability and even their sticker colour. DSs have repeatedly shown themselves clueless about their relative ability to other kids. DS-yr5 announced he wasn't in top sets after all regardless of what teachers told me about his high attainment, because he didn't get Mrs. X for teacher and he reckoned she always got the cleverest children.

yr4-DS says he is on top table for English but I know he's only very average at literacy. I suspect he was put on that table to minimise how much he distracts others & is distracted by them. Either that or his is a class of the turnip-brains.

It makes for confrontation Cat ...parents claiming the child reads well and the teacher saying sorry but they are really struggling ...and child caught in the middle.

The reason for the confrontation in that case is because both the parents and the teacher are right. They've just got two different definitions of reading.

The parent is saying she can read this book well. And she can.

The teacher is saying, yes. But she can't read these others.

Instead of the teacher just calling the parent wrong and carrying on merrily what she should do is literally show the parent what her definition of reading and struggling means. Because if she doesn't then the misunderstanding is set to continue.

No the child can not read the book at all they are reciting the words. Turn two pages and the child will carry on reciting

Of course, if the child doesn't recognise the words at all then she's not reading the book. That's not what I'm saying. My daughter can sound out all the words in books substantially longer and more complicated than her school books. So, she can read them without help. But that doesn't mean that I want to march into her school and say that she should now have adult Ladybird books as readers. I know that the only reason she can read these particular books is because she's very familiar with them. But if you pick lines out at random, or phrases at random she'll read them perfectly for you.

For children who get substantial amounts of reading material at home I'm unsure of how useful school reading books actually are. I don't think my child's school books are extending her reading at all. We've got an instruction manual on child development at home which is beautifully illustrated and she's purloined it. And today she was sounding out the phrase "additional information."

I like children to get to at least blue level by the end of YR but children generally go up to Year 1 on every level from pink to lime! Continue to read daily at home and I agree that a wide variety of books is important.

Wow.....I'm off to read all these replies!