New entrant passes with flying colours

Silioti Fatiaki listens to daughter Elizabeth, 5, reading at St Mary's in Northcote. Photo / Steven McNicholl

Time is ticking for 5-year-old Elizabeth Fatiaki to reach national standards of reading but a trial run with six months to go suggests she has nothing to worry about.

New national education standards released yesterday include reading comprehension tests for pupils with one year of schooling.

Elizabeth, a Year 1 pupil at St Mary's School in Northcote, had a go at one of the tests, and breezed her way through The Way It Was by Dot Meharry in less than five minutes.

Compound words "grandma" and "sometimes" did not faze her.

She recognised the stove was "burning", although she could not identify it was wood in the fire.

Even the big word, "microwave" failed to trip her up - there's one of them at home.

She noticed that pages alternated between past and present.

Pages about great-grandma were from "a long time ago" while pages about the narrator were from "now", said Elizabeth, who has been at school for just six months.

Under the new guidelines, students are said to meet the standard if they display certain behaviours while reading the text, such as rereading passages about obsolete concepts such as lighting a fire in a stove.

Guidelines advise teachers to look for specific signs of comprehension. "The student may reread to check that they have read the sentence correctly and may re-examine the illustration."

Among the key indicators for the Meharry text were whether students read compound words in chunks, understood the story was about comparisons between past and present, and wondered why great-grandma would have her bath in the kitchen.

St Mary's principal Paul Engles said students learned at staggered speeds and having standard tests every six months made no sense.

"In [Elizabeth's] case it's nonsense. She could be on to the next standard before she's measured for this one.

"Children come in at different levels and progress at different levels."