Reading bands- is there a big difference within bands?

[Tiquismiquis]

Just after some advice really as new to reading bands with a reception child and trying to supplement the books at school. My daughter is red band but surprised at how different the difficulty seems to be.

Eg we’ve got songbirds at home and stage 2 is quite comfortable for her with sentences like:
‘He sings to the cat and he sings to the dog.’

We had another red band book from our school’s online scheme with these sentences:

• No that’s absurd.
• In the night, Dora went prowling in the garden.

The step up seems massive to me and it felt like far harder work. Is it normal to find some books much harder within a band? The difference between those sentences and the ‘Tim sat in a pit’ pink books seems huge. Is the jump up to yellow as hard?

The Songbird books are decodable and should be matched to your daughters current phonics knowledge and skills. The other books are based on a flawed system that requires the child to use cues to read.
The book banding system was created using criteria based on discredited Whole Language theory and is simply based on number of letters in a word, number of words in a sentence, number of sentences on the page, number of pages in the book. You'd probably be better looking at the next set of Songbirds.

Thank you Norestformrz that’s so interesting. I was quite shocked tbh. I’ll carry on with songbirds.

DD is on yellow and seems to get Dandelion Readers books. I don't know if these are within the reading scheme or the school have coded them themselves. I bought some extra and they weren't coded by stage but I bought the next set based on the ones she had already read at school and the digraphs they are learning in phonics. They seem quite good. An example is 'Look on the right, a planet' yells Zig. (This was an igh book). They are decodable as long as the child has learnt the relevant digraphs. I also got them for a reasonable price on phonicsbooks.co.uk

Check out free ebook reading schemes on Oxford owl and big cat collins during lockdown you can access more for free they follow similar bindings to school and phonic based for early years.