reception reading question

[sleeplessinderbyshire]

Help! Teacher etiquette advice needed. Is dd's teacher going to hate me for writing in her reading diary that she's finding term three of ort red level very dull and as she's been reading yellow band songbirds books at home for three months please could we discuss her moving up a level? She apparently does purple level read-write-inc at school which Google tells me is equivalent to blue level ort so no idea what is going on... (or am I turning into ghastly tiger mother? )

Individual books do map exactly to the book bands ... but ORT stages is one criteria book banding another and phonic phases another so basically you are trying to measure the same thing using 3 different units of measure.

Bookbanding doesn't really correlate to phonics

Here are some examples of Magic Key stories that, if I remember correctly, run consecutively but don't fall into the same book bands. I'm fairly sure they were originally designed to be read one after another - certainly all level 6 stories before moving onto level 7 for example. As you can see level 8 has one story banded orange, with level 6 having two stories banded turquoise. So I take that to mean that the two level 6 turquoise banded stories are more challenging than the orange level 8 story.

Level 6 - stories
In the Garden .............Green
Kipper and the Giant ...Orange
Land of the Dinosaurs .Orange
Robin Hood ................Orange
The Outing .................Turquoise
The Treasure Chest .....Turquoise

Level 8 stories
The Kidnappers .........Orange
Viking Adventure .......Turquoise
The Flying Carpet ......Purple
A Day in London ........Purple
The Rainbow Machine .Purple
Victorian Adventure ....Purple

They don't fall into the same book bands because it is a different measurement criteria so you can only look at individual titles not whole stages or phases or bands.

throw levels in for good measure and it gets more complicated ...

I've noticed DD can happily do ORT with ease but other schemes' books are trickier even though the school have them within the same band.

Is this because they rely much more heavily on phonics progression rather than HFW/ they won't include sounds that won't have been covered yet?

Depends on the ORT series BigBongTheory. If they are using a older look and say series then they have a core vocabulary at each level which is repeated ad nuseam to give children practice with the words being introduced. They also have a very predictable sentence structure. Whilst other schemes do have that it tends to be hammered home slightly less. It's not unusual for children who can read ORT well to struggle with anything that isn't an ORT book.

Not sure whether a similar situation applies to the newer phonics based ORT books though. None of the children I know that have used them have struggled when reading other books.

Thanks. ORT probably makes up 1/4 of the total books she gets back but even the recent ones by Julia Donaldson seem to be easier. They do have a lot of older books from other schemes though.

Thinking a bit more about it, the answer to your question might be hugely complicated. I'd think it probably depends on whether the ORT books are decodable or not, whether the other schemes are decodable or not, how thorough the schools phonics teaching is and how they are using the scheme books they send home.

The children I know that used songbirds were in a school with a commercial phonics scheme, were only sent home with books that contained phonics sounds they knew, and read to the end of songbirds scheme before being sent home with books from other 'non-decodable' schemes. At that point they had all the knowledge and skills they needed to make the non-phonic schemes decodable. Very different to a school that sends home a mixture of decodable and non-decodable schemes a the same time where children will come across words they don't have the knowledge to sound out.

I think our school is the latter. They just have a huge pile of books from over the years and they've gone through them themselves with coloured dots. We've had some ORT that are yellow in our red band and vice versa.

This mostly works!

Thanks everyone. I feel even more worried now. Friends (articulate graduate women) with kids higher up the school say their only complaint is that the school is too pushy and academic.... arrrghhhhhhhh perhaps I'll have another litle chat tomorrow (and forever have my card marked as an evil cow)

I have found the same with ORT books BigBongTheory. They do seem easier (less words per page, much less complicated in terms of decoding) than other scheme books in the same band. I subscribe to Reading Chest and I have opted for all schemes other than ORT, because ORT is what we get from school, and these other books although they claim to be the same band, are quite a bit trickier!! And they are all decodable too.

I've given up and subscribed to Reading Chest too as I don't need to help DD at all with the current books from school so they seem a bit pointless. And then school throws in a random one that's at least twice as hard as the ORT ones!

Definitely keep pushing with the school. Unless they can give you a reasonable excuse for why they're not moving your DC up the levels, they need to be doing something about it.

I had heard something quite worrying over the weekend about some schools that will delay moving children up, while waiting for the rest of the children to catch up.

Luckily DD is in, what appears to be, a supportive school. They are doing assessments with the Reception children at the moment to confirm their reading levels and they have moved DD into the Purple, Level 8 Band. It's a very small school and she's the only one on that level I believe so I will continue to monitor and read more with her at home, to make sure that they don't try and hold her back while the others catch up...

They say they ensure that children are working in school at several levels above the books they bring home

So stop inciting the OP to make fusses about 'levels'.

Child is working at appropriate level at school and OP can give her whatever she likes to read at home.

Wahey, today she's come home with 2 yellow ORT Biff and Chip books ("Bad Dog" and "The Go-Kart"). Read them both straight through without needing any help. Seems this week her teacher heard her read and put her straight up to yellow (has read 2x a week with the TA for months and months but not with the class teacher)

Has gone to bed with a smile and reading another book to herself!