Son stuck with reading

[Bumblebeeep]

My DS in year 1 seems to be stuck on the blue reading band and doesn’t seem to be anywhere near progressing from it. His teacher said she had hoped he would have moved to green by now. She was vague when I asked what we could do to help him other than hearing him every night. We already do this. Is there anything else I can do to help him?

Blue is ok for this point in year 1 children learn at different speeds.

He might not have been ready for some phonemes when they were taught last year (hence not recognising them straight away now).

I'd suggest printing out some sound mats (phases 3 and 4) to have alongside reading at home. If he gets stuck on a digraph/trigraph then you can show him it and talk about the sound. Maybe play a game of "tennis" taking it in turns to generate words with that sound in (don't worry too much about the spelling at this stage- it's more about hearing the sound).

Also, have you seen Mr. Thorn does phonics on YouTube? That's another brilliant resource for embedding new phonemes.

Blue is still expected level for this point in year I think, so he doesn’t sound like he’s too far behind. It’s not helpful to think about it in those terms but it’s impossible not to. Kids are very aware how they are doing compared to classmates. My son is y1 and I tell him it doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing as long as he’s doing his best I am proud of him, but he’s still really competitive.
He was on blue books for months and months but he went through green in a couple of weeks and is on orange now, so I wouldn’t be worried if I was you.