Can anyone explain the reading bands?

[lau86]

I'm confused, not that it matters I guess but I do like to monitor his progress. Why do the levels/ colours not match up, even on the same book? He is reading a book with a little red circle, which I believe is level 2, the book says stage 3 stories and has a blue splodge? It's 'the egg hunt'. What level is he on?!

 

[sabby52]

The Egg hunt is a stage 3 Oxford tree reading level, the same happened with my son, I always went with the level printed on the book, the stickers and levels the teachers printed on the books I just ignored, Oxford reading tree seems to be the most popular band of books so I just stuck with that.

 

[jd83]

There are multiple methods to level a book, so the books include multiple methods on the covers so that you can determine the level of the book for the method you prefer to use, or that the school uses. For example, our school uses AR and Lexile leveling, so we use those methods when looking for a book level, and ignore the other levels included on the book since the school doesn't use those particular methods. If you know any teachers, I'd ask one of them to show you which specific methods to look for on the books and what they look like, so you know what to pay attention to. My SIL teaches and showed me.

 

[george83]

The best way to be sure would be to ask his school how they level their books as each school could do it differently. At the school I teach in we add our own coloured labels to books as we use a range of schemes all combined together so the children experience a range of different book styles. Any other levels/colours on our books could technically be ignored by our parents.

In our school it goes black, pink, red (which are usually for early readers/average foundation stage children) then yellow, green, blue (which is average year 1) then orange, turquoise, purple, gold (where we aim for year 2 to be at the end of the year) then white and lime.

 

[lau86]

We had parents evening the other day and apparently he is doing well, that feedback has just helped me to leave this alone a little bit!