Assessing reading

Nearly all of the children enjoy books. Or perhaps they enjoy owning books. We went to the library so they could get a book that took their fancy and read it over a few weeks. They love getting their books out and holding them but I didn’t often see them looking inside. They would carry them around the class and take annoyance at anyone who touched a book that didn’t belong to them. Many of the children had books which were far beyond their reading ability and understanding some of them just liked the pictures or the colour of the cover.

The standard of reading varied greatly throughout the class. Phonics provision was very good but because of the many other factors affecting the children’s home lives many of them had difficulty with reading. Even still I was very impressed with the ability of most. The level of comprehension was good as well. I saw no cases where the child could read but not comprehend a sentence.

One of the boys I heard read had some speech difficulties but this did not show at all in his reading, accept in some pronunciation, as he was a very confident reader. He had no trouble with less common words and could easily answer my questions about the text. I heard him read from the reading scheme only which is designed to give the children exposure to the GPC’s and words in increasing difficulty and also make the stories interesting for the child. The books were filled with pictures to aid with comprehension, give clues to tricky words and probably to make it more interesting, but this child took no interest in the pictures at all. In fact it took quite a bit of prompting to get him to answer questions about the hidden information in the pictures. This is either because he’s not very observant or I think he just didn’t see the point in looking at the pictures, after all he was meant to read the words not look at the pictures.

I got the impression that most of the children didn’t read at home, except for home work on the reading scheme. They would most likely be placed in front of the television or computer and left there. They like to be read to, sometimes, and do enjoy stories of their choice but reading seems to be a thing reserved for school only.