Humerous /quirky authors/books for year 5 reluctant readers?

[Berrie]

I'm doing some one to one tutoring and I need a shortish book that my pupils can read with their parents or alone. I'm working on their writing but I feel that their construction of sentences would be improved my more familiarity with texts.
Hope someone can help.

Have you looked at the Barrington Stokes publishers? - specially aimed at reluctant or struggling readers. (My ds's school, which is among other things dyslexia-specialist, works with them - ds has an editor's credit on one of the books!)

Humorous...oh dear, wrong thread for a spelling mistake!

Thanks Bink will look!

The Barrington Stokes books are great.
What sort of reading age are you talking about?
i.e. are these bright kids your tutoring for 11+ and think if they were reading more their literacy would improve?
Or are these very low ability children who are struggling to read full stop?

No not low ability but those who have failed to make proper progress. Don't know about reading age but I'd imagine level 2a/3.

Spiderwick Chronicles go down quite well as they are quite short, but are beautifully presented - with illustrations - but feel like a 'proper' book.

Another thing that's popular are short stories by Paul Jenningslike these ones

Do let me know how you get on, and post any tips of your successes. I do booster groups with yr7 students, and continually work on encouraging them to read for pleasure ... it's very slow and success is rare. But I keep trying.

Thanks for your help roisin. I'll look at those.
I'm taking part in the Making Good Progress Pilot as a tutor. Each child gets 10 hours of one to one tuition out of school hours.
I've done many of the interventions, ALS, Booster groups in school, after school, Summer school, FLS and so on...can't say any of them were wonderful so glad to hear that you are not always hugely successful
The maths tuition worked quite well I thought but literacy is so much more complex and although it is supposed to be my subject, I'm not sure that we are going to get very far in 10 hours.

I know! I have small groups of 6-8 students, 3 hrs a week for 3 weeks per unit. Some students will do 3 units, most only 2 per year. It's just not enough.

Many of the children have complex S&L-related SEN, and they just don't get the input they need.

Reading Recovery is the one intervention programme I've heard good things about.

I've not done it myself but I've also heard good things about it. With enough input it is bound to make a difference...it's not rocket science is it? I did do Better Reading Partnership and that did produce very good results but our new Headteacher at the time, in her wisdom, wasn't interested in continuing the first thing that had actually produced some results!

Three hours is quite a lot though...you still don't feel it's making a difference?

I'm beginning know what you mean about the individual complex difficulties. I've got 5 children who all need work on the same 3 targets involving sentence construction and consistancy of tense / verb agreement. But I'm finding that they all have completely different needs and my head is spinning as I have not got to grips whith them all yet. I'd have happily devised a series of guided sessions for them when I had a class and felt jolly pleased with myself too!

Writing takes time...it's not like getting to grips with a calculation...right, you can do that...on to the next thing.

It's really useful to discuss this with you actually. Being out of school, I'm quite isolated. If I try to talk to teachers at school, not only do they not have time, they think I don't know what I'm doing and need help. I've got a couple of meetings coming up so it's useful to order my thinking here!

The problems are so deep-rooted. Many of the children I am working with do not speak in grammatically coherent sentences, outside of school they do not hear English spoken 'correctly' and they do not read at all. As a result they cannot correctly identify 'sentences' from a selection of phrases.

So expecting them to write correctly, or to spot their errors after writing, seems nigh-on impossible.

I do think reading is key, and if we could get them reading as a priority some of the rest would follow automatically.

I love working with these groups, and they certainly do make progress. But it's a long haul.