Reading 'stamina'

[JennyPen]

Hi all.

I've posted a couple of times about reading for my 5 year old(almost 6) DD.

She is doing well but one thing i notice is her reluctance at reading books with longer sentences, or 2 sentences per page, or a book more than 15 pages long. She'll complain and be restless even though if i encourage her she can read every word!

I just got some ruth miskin superphonic books which look lovely to read compared to ORT, starting at blue level which she's be totally comfortable with as very short familiar words and no ridiculous ORT type sight words however the green level seems a big step up with much more text.

So - question is, are a lot of children like this with longer books, does their stamina for reading improve or is it likely she's always be like this!!

maybe she just doesn't want to read a lot?
i can remember when i learned to read I used to beg my mum to read stuff to me, cos i liked it better.

i loved books, and i loved being read to, but it wasn't until i was older that i was really happy reading stuff by myself (and was always a total bookworm!)

i think sometimes they just get tired of having to read, esp if they;'re doing lots at school too. sometimes at home they just want to relax and not have to do anyhting

i found stamina did take a while to build. We and lots of people I know take it in turns . So I read a page, they do.
Worth looking out for books with lots of spacing. Also might be worth getting eyesight tested if you haven't already. Early Dr Suezz are quite good too like fox in socks

Yes, stamina does improve too as they get better. I guess partly because it takes less thought.

I've always found the number of words in a book reasonably well-matched with my son's stamina. If we read harder/longer books we did as has already been suggested and took a page each, and then a chapter each etc.

Very approx number of words in books:

Blue 125
Green 175
Orange 350
Turquoise 500
Purple 650
Gold 1100
White 1250

There's quite a leap between purple and gold isn't there? Had been thinking DS's books were getting quite long and it seems I was right.

Yes, I think of the change from purple to gold as being a stamina issue and then the move from gold to white being more about the language again.

As her reading improves and speeds up her stamina will improve too, as she will actually be able to enjoy reading and read for the sake of the story rather than seeing it as a 'reading' activity.

If she finds reading hard and therefore has to put a lot of effort in, of course she won't want to do it for very long. Persevere with short burst of reading a couple of times a day plus what she's doing at school and by the time she's 8 you'll probably have forgotten all about this worry!

thank you all!! Totally reassuring - we will do just that, short bursts....hard to see the end of the tunnel, life was so much easier before primary school

DS (4.11) has the Superphonics books, they're fab aren't they! He does read the green ones but the next ones up (blue or purple I can't remember) he gets fed up of reading so we read a page each. Most of the time then he'll tell us that actually he CAN read the page we're reading and he'll take over and read it. Maybe you could take it in turns to read a page with your DD??

Reading longer books does take a lot more stamina. For a start, the child has to say a lot more words, which can be tiring.

Where there are more than 5 lines per page and moving up to full size books, the child has to navigate around the page. Both my dd's struggled with this at first, and had to use a finger to guide them from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. Dd2 (6 in Y2) who is a great reader can still struggle with this.