Reading test at end of Reception?

[Ginmummy1]

Yesterday DD came home with a sticker and certificate for reading a list of words out of a little book with the teacher. She said most/all of the class did it.

I assume this was an assessment of where they've got to with their phonics/reading by the end of Reception, and will help the teacher to form the end-of-year reports and for general school reporting.

Is there a standard list of words to test reception children? Do they assess reading age like they used to when I was at school?

I'm just being nosy really. What's it all about?

Could have been anything really, there isn't a standard list. It might have been a phonics assessment, it might have been common exception words. There's no reading age test in Reception.

There are reading tests that will give reading ages in reception but as Fairuza says there isn't a national test so it could be any of the commercially produced tests available.

I remember my ds taking reading test in reception. It gave him an unrealistic reading age. Really it was a decoding age, since he was only tested on reading words, not "reading" something and testing his understanding.
Ginmummy1, I am sure you know what your dd is capable of. I wouldn't worry about it.

PERA (phonics & early reading assessment) tests word decoding plus sentence reading and comprehension in a single test for reception to Y2

PM Benchmarking also tests comprehension and recall.

Unfortunately PM Benchmarking doesn't match the requrements of the National Curriculum as it is linked to Reading Recovery.

Thanks, everyone. I have the impression (perhaps wrongly) that DD’s school is quite old-fashioned in its approach (that’s an observation rather than a complaint). I wondered whether other schools were doing the same thing. Just nosey!

Irvine, it was a list of words rather than a ‘story’, so it would have been a decoding (or word recognition) test rather than a comprehension test.

From my memory of ‘reading age’ tests (much older age of course), we weren’t quizzed on comprehension. We just read a passage of text with words of increasing difficulty until we started to struggle. How is ‘reading age’ assessed these days? Is it still done as a rule? A friend is given a reading age for her DC (currently year 1) at each parents evening. Is this the norm?

I didn’t think there was a statutory test in reception (we all know about the phonics test in Y1) but presumably most schools will do some sort of assessment towards the end of each year, for internal reporting and for the reports to parents.

I’m not concerned about DD at all. I’m just the parent of an only child who has just started school, and I’m fascinated by the whole thing and a bit ambitious for my DD.

Most teachers do tests throughout the year rather than end of the year ime - my school does phonics assessments throughout the year with word lists. DS's school use PM Benchmarking to give reading levels.

How is ‘reading age’ assessed these days?

I'm only familiar with PM Benchmarking. The child reads a book aloud to the teacher, who counts their errors. The teacher then takes the book away and the child is asked to retell the story and answer a couple of questions.

If the child reads 90-95% correctly and answers the questions they are on the right level, and each level is matched to a reading age (years and months).

I'd say that your DC was probably given a Fry's Common Words or a Jolly Phonics tricky words list. Something along those lines anyway.

Maybe it was this list here? I believe at my LOs school they are expected to know these words by the nod of reception.
High frequency words

*end of reception

There a huge variety of single word reading tests that have been aound since the '50s such as Schonell which give a reading age.

Jolly Phonics word lists aren't meant to be used as a reading test and don't generate a reading age.

DD did the Year 1 phonics screening check this week in reception, said all the kids did it, so presumably she'll be pretty well rehearsed by next year when they actually do it.

Not sure why schools feel need to rehearse ...hopefully they were actually using it as diagnostic tool to assess phonic skills

mrz I doubt that the school is doing it as a rehearsal, there's been no indication that the school spends time rehearsing the test in yr1 or loads of SATS practice. So presumably it's for some useful reason, DD had actually done the 2015 phonics check at home before from when we were talking about the SATS, and she was flawless, so presumably the phonics teaching is pretty successful with DD at least.