How are KS1 reading levels assessed?

[IndigoBell]

Can any teacher please answer a reading levels question?

How can school tell me my DD (in Year2) is a level 1B in reading when she really struggles to read green band books at home, and in no way would be reading them with 90% accuracy?

They keep on telling me 'but she understands what she reads'.

Do you think she reads significantly better at school than she does at home?

Can you award a 1B if you can't read green band books fluently?

What evidence would school need to justify her reading at 1B?

She has been assesed by SaLT, but not by an Ed Psych.

I honestly don't think she's 'playing me up'. I think she must work better at school - and also their expectations, and their definition of being able to read / write, are different to mine.

Which I know sounds weird, and like I am a pushy parent. But I'm not. Just a terribly anxious parent. Because she really has been failed by school.

Has the SaLT identified any areas of difficulty?

Many Ed Psychs won't investigate possible dyslexia until the child is 7+

I'm not suggesting she's playing up only that some children really do try harder for teachers. I have a little girl in my class who comes early every morning to work with me on her reading quite happily but mum reports that she is not so focused when they read together.

SaLT report said she was average for receptive language and above average for expressive language (or the other way round.) Which was actually lovely to hear, because although I know she isn't stupid, this was the first time I'd had it in black and white.

She is 7. But SENCO won't refer her to Ed Psych because they think she's making 'adequate progress'. ( She was a 1C at the begining of the year, so she's made some progress since then.)

But yes, I guess she does try harder for teachers. Which I guess is good.... Then again the teacher never listens to her read, only the TA.... In school being taken out for 1-1 makes her feel special? Wheras 1-1 with me just feels like homework?

The teacher NEVER hears her read? Shame on her! I hear my SEN children far more than the others, they are the ones that need me the most.

The teacher never hears her read.

Only about once a term when I make a real fuss about her books being too hard. After which I'm told she can read fine.

The teacher never hears her read.

Only about once a term when I make a real fuss about her books being too hard. After which I'm told she can read fine.

How do you all know what book band your kids are on? I haven't got a clue what colour dd is on. There are no coloured labels on books she brings home and they seem to vary from very easy to very hard! For instance, last week she brought home a book that she could probably have read at the start of Y1, I'd say equivalent in difficulty to ORT stage 4/5. Last week she was given The Wizard of Oz which was beyond her in every way.

Perhaps her school is not following a book band regime?

I asked the teacher a while ago about the huge difference in books and she said the easier book was for fluency and expression and the harder was to push her vocabulary. It still seems quite extreme though and how would you place such different books within a band?

Dd is in Y2 by the way.

I quite frankly cannot see her learning to read any other way. The only other ways there is to 'learn' to read is to memorise entire words as 'wholes'or to memorise 'onsets and rimes. Now, there are a few people who are able to do this, but you've just said she has a memory problem, so that's out, isn't it?

I'm afraid that you will have to keep pegging away at the phonics; she needs to learn the 160 ish common letter/sound correpondences to the stage when she can automatically respond with a 'sound'(or sounds) for each correspondence. (If you think that seems a lot, just consider that if she learns 'whole words' there are several thousand words in a fairly limited 'reading' vocabulary and 250,000 in a standard English dictionary. As far as onset and rime goes there are 1,260 'word families'.) If she has a poor memory learning the correspondences will mean lots and lots and lots of repetition, more than most children need. But it is really worth it because once she 'has' them secure she'll be able to read just about anything.

It is a shame that the school won't let you in on the secrets of RWI! It really isn't at all complicated or difficult; children have to sound out and blend every word they encounter (no-one tells them or gives them 'clues' - the letters are themselves the 'clues') and they should not be given books to read which contain words which are beyond their current phonic knowledge. The so called 'high frequency words' should be sounded out and blended just like any other word. Some very few words have extremely bizarre letter/sound correspondences (like 'one' and 'two') but they are sounded out and blended just like any other word with attention paid to the tricky correspondence in them - which I believe in RWI is called the 'grotty grapheme'.

I feel that the 'thinking in pictures' is probably a bit of a red herring as far as reading is concerned. There are no alternative ways of writing words without letters, so to read them your daughter just has to learn how to interpret the letters.

I suspect that the ORT books are too hard for her because they are not meant to be used alongside a synthetic phonics programme; they are written in repetitive text, with often quite complex words, in order to reinforce 'look and say' whole word teaching.

You are most definitely not the only Mum to complain that your child's reading books are too hard. Some 20% of children leave secondary school virtually illiterate. There are quite a few very worried mums out there...

There may or may not be other ways of learning to read - but there are definitely other ways of teaching to read.

Read, Write, Inc is a good program. I'm even prepared to believe it's the best (and most expensive) program out there. That still doesn't mean it works for all children.

However, very interesting point about the ORT books. I think maybe this is part of the problem. She might be able to read a phonetic green band book, but not an ORT green band book.

If synthetic phonics was the answer to all our woes:

1. Why in totally phonetic languages (like Italian) are there still dyslexic children who struggle to learn to read?

2. And why have experiments shown that we can decode words as long as the first and last letter are correct? For example, see readable mess

To point 2, you're not really 'reading' that 'readable mess'. I'm certainly a lot slower making sense of that than I would be reading normal text. What you're doing is completing quick anagrams. Lots of short words are spelt correctly in that passage which gives you context, and then you basically puzzle out what the jumbled up words say. Saying that people can read that passage is a bit like saying that people can work out anagrams.

I can read that just as quickly as correctly spelled words without having to work it out. I do think people's brains work differently when it comes to reading, but I have no scientific knowledge whatsoever to back up that statement!

I would imagine that there will still be dyslexic children where the language is very phonetic because they will still have issues with remembering teh sounds and processing what they read. My dd is also dyslexic and she is progressing slowly (school doesn't do much in teh way of phonics after P1 so I do it at home). But her issue is that she finds it hard to remember the sounds - and her process speed can also be quite slow. But it is still easier for her to remember teh sounds and sound out the words that it would be to memorise whole words.
Also - my dd does perform significantly better in teh morning at school than in teh evening with me. Remember that your dd is probably having to work very much harder at school than other children. By teh time she gets home she will be tired. Also, it is a lot easier to be frustrated with mum than with the teacher!

Also, when Dyslexia Institute have set some of our children individual programmes of work, they always involve daily systematic phonic teaching - it's slow going, but has never failed to work so far.

Thanks haggisaggis Feenie When you say 'slow going' - how slow do you mean? Years? How many?

And when you say 'never failed to work' - do you mean that eventually they can read as fluently and as confidently as they should be able to? Or are they always a bit slow (as haggisaggis's DD seems to be)

(Just trying to understand what might be ahead for me...)

Thanks

sorry if things have moved on a bit, but from a simple perspective on levelling if your daughter is building cvc and has 50 (i think thats hat you said) high frequency 'sight' words out of context then she would be beyond a 1C so levelled at 1B though not necessarily a 'secure' 1B.

Of the 7 children I can think of, in general all struggled until around y4 (despite regular individual phonic work) and picked up properly around y5. Six left y6 with a level 4 in reading and one child was a level 5.

All were level 1 readers at the end of year 2 and around a 2b entering Year 4.

To be quite honest, it is very slow going with the 'mainstream' established dyslexia programmes. You could be talking 3 or 4 years! They do teach phonics, but they teach it very slowly and incorporate a great deal of unnecessary stuff, like putting out an alphabet arc at every session, chanting letter name, sound and clue word at every session, feeling wooden letters in a bag, learning word families & consonant blends, learning the 'rules of syllabification....

In the days when teaching reading was just about exclusively 'whole language'/'look and say, and phonics was a dirty word, the dyslexia programmes (which are all based on the work of Dr. Orton in the 1920s - so you'd have hoped that they'd moved on a bit from there...but, they haven't) were more successful than mainstream instruction; any phonics is better than no phonics. But modern Synthetic Phonics teaching is pacier and completely stripped of all the time wasting stuff which doesn't help children to learn to read. It is better than the 'dyslexia' programmes but the dyslexia people either assert that they are teaching synthetic phonics (which they are not) or ignore SP altogether.

If your daughter does have a memory problem then it will take a year, maybe two for her to become really secure with the phonics. It really depends on how much she already knows, how much she practices and how keen she is to learn.

The 'readable mess' is a complete red herring. For a start, it is an internet meme and has no sound scientific basis. Secondly, the only reason you can read it, as someone else has pointed out, is because you are a skilled reader and can do anagrams. If you believe that it is only the first and last letter of a word that counts then you are flying in the face of every piece of eye movement research which shows that skilled readers process all the letters in a word, sequentially, from L to R.

And you can't do anagrams until you are skilled at reading...

You say: "
There may or may not be other ways of learning to read - but there are definitely other ways of teaching to read."

I would agree only in so far as there are different techniques which children can use to learn how to sound out and blend words, and maybe for intesive learning of letter/sound correspondences, but the whole concept of SP is simple and it is its simplicity which makes it very powerful and effective.

BTW. I work with secondary age 'struggling readers'; in a school, so I see lots of them (between 20 - 40 in every new Y7 intake). Synthetic phonics has not failed me yet.

Sorry, just to answer your other question:

"1) Why in totally phonetic languages (like Italian) are there still dyslexic children who struggle to learn to read?"

The criteria for 'dyslexia' can be quite different in countries which have a 'transparent' alphabetic code. I don't know about Italy, but in Germany they apply the label to slow readers, not incompetent readers, because almost no German children fail to learn to read competently.

The programmes given to the children at our primary school were definitely synthetic phonics, maizieD, at a time when we wouldn't necessarily have used them in Y4 or Y5. Now we would use a programme like this as a matter of course if a child is suspected to be dyslexic, with excellent results.

The problem is many schools see a child struggling and instead of supporting the child they swap and change teaching methods until the child becomes really confused.
I get really annoyed with schools who use RWI then send home ORT with less than confident readers. Children need to be secure before books that use mixed methods are introduced.

Feenie,

Sorry; you posted about the children who had had intervention at your school while I was still writing my post so I didn't see your time scales! I was thinking of children I have encountered who have spent 4,5 years, or more, on Orton-Gillingham based programmes and still haven't progressed very far...