Reading

Another message we would like to communicate with our parent community around reading is the notion of ‘reading levels’. Over the years, some schools have communicated to parents about the ‘reading level’ of their child. We have tried not to focus on levels so much when sharing reading progress at Dayboro, but it has come up in parent teacher conferences over the years.

We are not wanting to focus on ‘reading levels’ for a number of reasons:

• Reading levels are only an indication of the types of texts we can use to help students read at their instructional level.
• Reading levels are not aligned to academic ratings.
• Reading levels are attached to reading tests / check-ins that we do with students. It is the information we gather from these check-ins about our students’ reading that is the most important information (not the level).
• Levels don’t explain the reading progress being made by a student even if they stay at that level for a while.
• Our new Department focus on reading will not include ‘levels’.

We encourage parents to discuss with class teachers, their child’s decoding skills, fluency, word comprehension and overall text comprehension.

Any questions, please feel free to e-mail me: dmath9@eq.edu.au

Dee Mathiesen  (Head of Curriculum)