Do all children really know how to read the 45 Reception words by the end of the Reception year?

[imaginaryfriend]

I'm curious. I keep hearing about these 45 words that 'all children are expected to be able to read by the end of the Reception year.'

Dd's in Reception now and is doing fine with her reading. I'm a parent helper with reading and I can tell that 3 groups would probably achieve that target of 45 words. But the other 3 groups would struggle, one group in particular who speak very little English.

So what happens if they don't know the 45 words? Who checks?

Its just a guideline and plenty don't meet it.

DS1's Infants had 400 keywords to learn in the course of the first 3 years and DS1 had only 32 by the end of Yr R. On the other hand he had all 400 by the end of the spring term in Yr 1 but reading just clicked for him in those 2 terms and he was away.

People get a bit caught up with guidelines I think but you have to have measures to see how children are progressing. The trick is to use it to show problems but not to get too hung up on it or turn it into a competition. Each child will get them at their own pace and so long as they are making progress, what does it matter?

Neicie he sounds just like my DS. And so does Buda's football fan. We had some interesting pronunciations of some of the foreign names.

Buda, DS1 in year 2 does have extra help and an IEP for learning in literacy and numeracy. The help and IEP was started in October. He has no special needs, although has not yet been screened for dylexia, he is 7 in 5 weeks. He is ORT level 5, but isn't ready to go any higher and was put on them because the stories were more interesting and they thought that might help him want to read. He can read about 35 of the top 100 words that they do at his school.

I'm about to have words with DS2's teacher as he has just brought home tonight again a book that he had for 2 weeks at beginning of October. I think everyone in our house has that book committed to memory now. It only has 2 words to a page and about 10 pages. He knows 8 of the top 100 words the school do.

I really have no idea where they should be and I am hoping that at some point it will all "click" with them as people say.

Sorry I got the names confused, I was replying to themildmanneredjanitor

No, not all do. As with every target type thing, some will know all of them, some may know none of them and many others fall somewhere in the middle.

I mean't to add also though that the school never gave either of my boys any words to learn until they were in year one, so would never have learn't them in reception as I think they were still learning their letter sounds then.

Children should not be given high frequency words to learn. It goes totally against the Rose report.

If a chid is taught to read by a good synthetic phonics programme they will be able to read all the reception high frequency words by the end of reception and probably all the year one and year two words without any problem.

Children need to learn their letter sounds and how to blend. Some children have weaker memories than others and may need extra help. Sometimes there are factors like glue ear that make it harder for a child to learn how to read.

Children learn at their own pace. Just because a child might be slow to learn to read does not mean that they are stupid. Learning to decode is only a small part of reading. Learning to comprehend is a bigger challenge.

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