Book Banding

At SHP we believe that it is vital that children foster a love of reading, whilst reading books which are challenging but confidence building.

The Book Band system helps us to grade our books by difficulty level. Each level has its own colour and includes a selection of different reading scheme books and ‘real’ books. The difference between each band is gradual so that children will not experience difficulty when moving from one to the next. 

Children are allocated based on their fluency and comprehension skills by teacher judgement. This chart gives an indication of the range of Book Band levels at which most children will be reading as they progress through the school. Please note, children are given a banded book once they have learnt all phonics sounds.

Before children read a book from the book band system, they read specific phonics books which match the GPCs that they have learnt this week.