Can your 1st grader read this? - Page 2

[Greenmama2]

My 5.5 year old could not read all of that, she would be tired and discouraged after a few sentences (perfectionist). However having read through the thread, I'm certain she would pass the DIBELS test. She would get through more than the first 20 words in one minute and it would take a little longer than that for her to give up.

[umsami]

My now second grader could have read that in first grade.  My current first grader (public school) would struggle with it.  He is currently reading a bunch of "Henry and Mudge" books--and is, according to his teacher, in one of the more advanced reading groups.  That seems like it's a bit harder.

[jest]

My 1st-grader can read it.

[2mama]

Yes and no... DS is 6 and can read the lightening thief by rick riodan, but dd#1 would have been in tears if someone suggested she read that. Each kid is so unique.. It will come in time.

[tankgirl73]

I was curious so I showed it to my daughter, who just turned 5.  I think her reading level is about first grade, so I was interested to see how she'd do.  She was fine for most of it and had trouble with 12 words, ones you might expect like "brought" and "thought" and "wrote" and "pieces".  But she got words like "sandwich" and "favorite" and "driveway" and "learning".

I know she gets a lot of her words from context clues.  She knows intermediate phonics but doesn't usually 'sound out' a whole tricky word.  You can see her stop when she gets to a tricky word, look ahead a few words, and come back to the tricky one with a (usually correct) guess based on the overall letter patterns.  In this passage, when she got to "she read a book" she initially said "she rode..." then corrected herself, "she READ a bike..."  Whoops!  "I mean, she read a BOOK!"  She had obviously initially scanned the whole phrase, saw the R-D and the B-K and guessed/filled in "rode a bike", but then noticed the phonics and corrected her first guess.  It was a VERY interesting and enlightening view into her process!!  :)

But since she is looking at the whole context and not just sounding out as she goes, she does read out loud with a good degree of fluency/meaning/sentence intonation.  Which sometimes doesn't happen when phonics is OVER-emphasized at the expense of 'natural' reading.  Ideally IMO it should be a blend -- phonics for decoding, sight words, and context clues (heck even when we're mature and literate readers, some words still depend on context... many words change pronunciation depending on whether they're being used as a noun or a verb, for instance).

I had her read it before I read the comment above about the '3 second rule' and timing how many words in one minute. But 3 seconds is about what we naturally do anyway.  So she definitely would have gotten more than 20 in one minute.  It took less than 5 to finish the whole passage, which is 218 words.  

All that being said, I would *not* expect the average first grader to be able to read the whole passage, and I think that's not the intent of the test anyway.  It's a measuring stick, and in order to be a good assessment it needs to be more challenging than the average student would need, so that it can still assess kids who are above the average.  I know that my daughter is a "precocious" reader, it runs in our family heh.  And it's also true that in general, boys are later than girls in reading development, across the spectrum of early-to-later readers.

So if you have to give that as a reading test, I would just use it as a marker of "where you're at" and only use it as a comparison against oneself... ie, you can do it again every few months to see how much progress you're making, and as an indicator of what kind of reading material you can expect your child to be able to handle, etc.  But not to use it as any kind of comparison between kids... there is a HUGE range of reading ability in first grade and it is all NORMAL, despite what they try to convince us of in public schools.  Anything from 5-8 is 'average' for starting to read, and outliers from 3-10 are still quite common too.

[MamaHappy]

No, there is no way my first grader could read that.  I'm not even sure my oldest could have read that when he was in 1st grade (and I considered him a strong reader).

-Sara

[inkslinger]

My 2nd grader could have read that last year.

[VisionaryMom]

Originally Posted by kathymuggle 
I don't think these reading tests or any tests, really, take into account those kids who learn in lightbulb bursts instead of incrementally.

Reading for my son has been in bursts, and he exceeds grade-level standards by about 2.5 years in reading. I don't know how it looks if you're an average reader, but it's definitely possible for kids who don't learn in a gradual progression to do fine on the tests.

To answer, yes, my 1st grader could read that passage. My 4YO could read some of it but not all. I don't know, however, that it's typical of the level of most first graders. Our district teaches both phonics and to read sight words, and it seems to go okay. My daughter definitely has a more intuitive understanding of reading whereas DS does not. He knew his letters and their sounds for probably 2 years before he was able to turn them into words. Once he did, he learned to read basic readers in about 4 weeks. We saw a huge leap again this year when he jumped 1.5 grade levels over the course of a 6-week period.

[kathymuggle]

Originally Posted by VisionaryMom 

Reading for my son has been in bursts, and he exceeds grade-level standards by about 2.5 years in reading. I don't know how it looks if you're an average reader, but it's definitely possible for kids who don't learn in a gradual progression to do fine on the tests.

DD is an average for year reader, which means if she is before a burst it look like she is behind, after a burst it may look like she is ahead.

Obviously, if you are ahead of the curve it is not going to matter if you learn in bursts or not.

[mamaupupup]

Hi there,

I have fraternal twin 5 yr old girls.  Neither one "reads" and I doubt they will read at this level next year.  My best guess is that they will read at this level sometime between 7 and 8 years old. 

However, they LOVE books, language, foreign languages, lyrics, books on tape, family stories, plays, etc.  I "worry" now and then about academics (whether or not I'm getting enough math and music in their lives) and I really never think about language arts.  We spend about 30 minutes each morning reading to the girls before the day starts (they choose the books), read poems to them at breakfast a few days a week, they have a "required" book time for an hour a day each afternoon (my oh my do I love that quiet time!), and we read three books a night before bed (or the equivalent 30+ minutes of a chapter book).  Needless to say, they are in a "language rich" environment. 

My biggest hope is that all these kiddos enjoy the written word!  And, at some point, I know I'll appreciate the testing to see if I'm doing my part as a guide to their learning process.  Thanks for bringing up the topic!

[edwardsmom]

Originally Posted by Daffodil 

My 6 year old (who would be in kindergarten just based on age, but would probably fit better in a first grade class) can read that, but he's a very good reader for his age.  At this point in her first grade year my DD would have had trouble with it (but she may have a learning disability.)  Here is a link to the DIBELS benchmarks goals.  As you can see, a first grader at this point in the year is only expected to be able to read 20 words of a sample like that in one minute.  The way it's administered, the child has 3 seconds to read each word and if she can't get it in that time, the test giver tells her the word and she continues on until a minute has passed.  The number of words that were read correctly in that minute are counted.  So a first grader wouldn't need to be able to read the whole thing to "pass" the assessment; she would just need to read 20 words successfully in a minute, and those 20 words could be mixed in with ones she couldn't read and had to get help with. 

  I just tested my 7.5  year old with this passage and he got 53 words right in 1 minute.  He also got 3 words wrong during that 1 minute.  If I was to put my ds in public school, I would have him be a 1st grader, but I consider him as just now, in January or February, ready to start 2nd grade work.  This reading assessment confirms that.

[Lineymom]

I have a 1st grader in K12 VA and we have to do dibels too!  I hate them and all the standardized testing practice our "teacher" adds as extra requirements, yuck!

Yes, he could read it with lots of help.  He had a similiar passage for his last dibels.  They time their words per min and the child knows they are being timed which makes him more nervous.  On a passage like this he got 45 wpm where as an easier one when he was not so nervous he'd do 60.

I did regular homeschool with my older son and we did hooked on phonics.  He was a much better reader.  The VA teacher has pushed me to push my second son, so much against my better judgement (and I pushed very little of the % she wanted me to).  For example, pounding site words into his brain in K instead of just sticking with the HOP that I knew worked, uhhh.