Jack has been reading quite a lot recently, and mostly with his mum. She’s been a star with him, putting in lots of time teaching him, researching and buying more and more books. to the point that Amazon are considering a closer distribution warehouse to cut costs!
At school, they grade children’s reading alphabetical bands – I don’t honestly know what constitutes each band, or what abilities are needed to move from band to the next, but they’re there!
At school, the children are encouraged to change their reading books daily, providing that the child can go at that pace. As Claire and/or I are reading with him before bed each night, he’s certainly getting through the books. Where we’re not able to get the book read of an evening, we do try and get it ‘nailed’ before he has his breakfast in the morning, as the little monster wakes at the crack of dawn! With his daily reading book, he’s also got a little writing book that is completed each time he reads – if either a teacher or ourselves reads a book with him, the book title is noted, dated and then his reading is summarised in a short sentence. As you can imagine, he’s going to need a new writing book soon, due to the vast amount of mini-books he’s read!
So – onto the bands and where he’s at.
In his writing book, his teachers would assess him and make notes and comments in there, along with their summary of his reading, as mentioned above. He’d come home from school being moved from a band E to an F, then to a G, and then a week or two later H and now an I..! His reading is becoming more and more fluent and he seems to even try to read poems in books in time with the verses!
Claire and I are both amazed at how well he’s doing. His spoken vocabulary has always been good, as we’ve always tried and tried to talk to him, and explain things to him, or look this up with him. I can only imagine that this has massively helped his reading, as he’s already aware of the words and so isn’t getting bogged down with ‘what’ he’s reading.
In addition, we read to him too, when he’s been behaved!! Due to his Amazon-worthy stock levels of books, I’ve been reading some children’s versions of some ‘big’ books, namely Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and a whole lot more. We’ve read books about the Titanic, World War I and II, the Olympics and many many more. Sometimes we pause and explain something that he might not understand, but mostly, we chip-on through and he loves them. Last night, for instance, we were reading the Tale of Two Cities, where I had to explain the concept of a guillotine, which he was a little surprised about, but then thought was ‘cool’ later.
