Oxford Reading Tree - help needed!

[backofthewardrobe]

Could someone please explain this reading scheme to me and why some parents are so obsessed with the various coloured levels.

I keep hearing “He’s reading pink books he should be on red books he’ll never get to gold books!” in the playground and I realise that the books get “harder” but the children have been on be same level that started at all year, when do they change?

Are there different levels within the coloured bands? Does it actually matter as long as your child is reading?

TIA

"Despite uncertainties in research findings, the practice seen by the review shows that the systematic approach, which is generally understood as 'synthetic' phonics, offers the vast majority of young children the best and most direct route to becoming skilled readers and writers. "
Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading

A recent research paper, published in January and based on assessing the quality of 12 meta-analyses covering 452 separate studies, has found “little evidence” in favour of any one particular method of teaching phonics, including SSP.

While phonics is accepted as an important of reading instruction there is absolutely not evidence that it should be used in isolation.

It should also be noted that phonics doesn't improve any other area of literacy than the ability to decode. Children also need comprehension skills and phonics though very useful does not need to be used in isolation.

Dehaene "Early childhood predictors of learning to read: a child’s understanding of the sound system of the language (phonological awareness) and the size of a child’s spoken vocabulary"
"As adults we have forgotten how we were as children. We have forgotten how difficult it was to learn to read and we think we can just lay our eyes on a word and it immediately pops to mind. Indeed, there is this notion of parallel reading, we read all of the letters at the same time. This gives us an illusion of whole-word reading, but in fact, if we look at the brain, the brain still processes every single letter and does not look at the whole shape. So whole word reading is a myth, basically. What we have is letter processing, but letter processing in parallel across all of the letters of the word. The brain does not use the global word shape. And in fact in children it’s even worse. Children require more and more time for more and more letters. ”

Norestformrz

But no one is arguing that phonics is useless. Everyone has said it is an important part of learning to read in the early years. What it should not be done though is used in isolation. In practise lots of kids will begin to recognise individual words long before they're taught to decode them. Kids will see the word "said" in books that are read to them and work it out for themselves because they're interested.

Phonics isn't taught in isolation it's taught as part of a language rich curriculum. You seem to be confusing teaching ineffective mixed methods that include some phonics with what is required. Look at the evidence

" In practise lots of kids will begin to recognise individual words long before they're taught to decode them. "
"This gives us an illusion of whole-word reading, but in fact, if we look at the brain, the brain still processes every single letter and does not look at the whole shape. So whole word reading is a myth," Dehaene

@Norestformrz

I'm not sure what you think you or are saying. I'm not in favour of teaching whole word reading. My only point was that for many average-higher ability children their reading will often begin to exceed the knowledge of phonics they've been explicitly taught (I agree that often this is because they're intuitively acquiring the phonetic knowledge without being explicitly taught). My point was also the same as yours that the students vocabulary will also massively influence their ability to decode. This is why as someone else said a student may well be able to read a level 5 book with ease but struggle more with a level 4 book and also why they'll be more fluent when reading a book about a subject of interest as they'll be familiar with much of the vocab despite it being technically more difficult than other books they might struggle with.

I think quite a few posters have just objected to the ridiculous notion that all books of a certain level will be exactly the same difficulty to all students and that you must never read a book with a child unless they've been explicitly taught every phonetic sound in it they might encounter.

Your point seems to be that children learn to recognise whole words such as said while science tells us that this isn't true and regardless of appearance the brain processes words sound by sound.
Even young children will be able to tell you the sounds they can hear when you say the word 'said' all it requires is the teacher to explain that the sound /e/ is spelt in said.

Floppy barked and barked and barked.

That's all you need to know.

"I think quite a few posters have just objected to the ridiculous notion that all books of a certain level will be exactly the same difficulty to all students and that you must never read a book with a child unless they've been explicitly taught every phonetic sound in it they might encounter."
It's a concern that so many teachers aren't familiar with the purpose of the book banding system and how it works and that you aren't aware of the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum (or choosing to ignore them)

Perhaps it's time to retire Biff, Chip et al. They were rubbish when they were first written and over three decades has done nothing to improve them

My August born didn't move book band in reception. She knew all phase 1 and 2 phonics sounds at least before starting school, but just could not grasp blending so stayed on wordless books until summer term then was put on Dandelion Launchers.

Sometimes it's not something you can teach if they aren't ready. Her school is an outstanding rated school and almost all pupils exceed age expectations but mine didn't get a GLD at end of reception. Her birthday is end of August and she simply was too young for academics. She's gone from pink to orange in year 1 which I think is about 5 or 6 levels and that excludes the other reading schemes she completed before starting ORT. I'm saying this because not moving book band's doesn't neccessarily mean a bad school, you've said there is large proportion of children who have ESL so it makes sense a large proportion will take a while to even get started on the levels.

They are only obsessed with reading levels in ks1. By ks2, most of children click and no parents really talk about reading levels anymore.

There's definitely significant variations in how difficult my child finds different books within the same band. A lot of that variation is down to how interested (or not) he is in the book but he's also had a couple of poetry books home recently where the vocabulary is well within his capabilities but the subtext goes way over his head.