Book Band Information

Reading:

At Bredon Hancock's, we use Oxford Reading Tree texts that correlate to the National Book Bands. In Early Years and Key Stage 1, the school uses the 'Essential Letters and Sounds' phonics programme. Within this scheme, there are phonetically decodable texts for each sound that the children cover. The children will also be exposed to banded books, which are closely linked with the scheme and can be phonetically decoded. As a rough guide, children are expected to reach the highest level (lime) at seven years old. Children who read above lime level are reading fairly fluently and although some books are still graded above this level, children are reading such a wide range of material that the banding becomes not so important. Below is a guide of what colour band you can expect your child to be reading in school and at home:

The books will vary in a number of ways, including layout, size, vocabulary and length, to give the children a rich diet of literature. The difference between each colour band/number stage is very gradual, so that children do not experience great difficulty moving up through the scheme.

Progress through the bands is not automatic and it is important to ensure that children working in the early bands have secure understanding so that they remain in control of the task and well-motivated as they move on to more challenging texts. 

To find out more information about each book band, please click here.