Three cats or two: quantity and prepositions in tick-or-cross
In a Pre A1 Starters Reading and Writing Part 1 practice, children look at a garden picture and write a tick or a cross for five sentences. The picture shows two cats under a tree, a boy on a red bike, a ball on a table, a girl wearing a blue hat, and three birds in the tree. Lina, aged 7, ticks 'There are three cats under the tree', ticks 'The ball is under the table' and ticks 'The girl has got a red hat'. She correctly ticks 'The boy is on a bike' and correctly crosses 'There is a dog in the garden', so she scores 2/5. She has been reading English for nine months and decodes words like 'tree' and 'garden' without help, but reads aloud slowly, one word at a time. Her class teacher calls her 'a good reader'. She is upset by the score and says the pictures are 'tricky'. You have her script, a spare copy of the picture and 25 minutes of the next lesson.
1. Diagnose what Lina is doing when she reads a sentence against the picture.
Read the worked answer
She is matching the first strong noun to the picture and stopping.
- 'three cats' - she sees cats and ticks; 'three' is not checked against two cats.
- 'ball ... under the table' - she sees a ball and a table and ticks; the preposition is not checked against 'on'.
- 'red hat' - she sees the hat and ticks; the colour is not checked against blue.
Her two correct answers fit the same pattern. 'Boy on a bike' is true in every word, so noun-matching happens to produce a tick. 'Dog' is not in the picture at all, so even noun-matching produces a cross. Neither correct answer required her to check a small word.
Conclusion. Decoding is age-appropriate and the picture is being used; what is missing is sentence-level checking of number words, prepositions and colour adjectives. She is not a weak reader - she is a reader who has not yet been taught what to check.
Test the alternative. Read two sentences aloud to her and ask for ticks. If she is right when listening, the problem is reading attention, not comprehension.
2. What do you do in the next 25-minute lesson, and how do you know it worked?
Read the worked answer
Teach 'check the little words'.
- Take one sentence. Underline the noun, then circle every other word and ask 'is this true in the picture?'
- Model it once on 'The girl has got a red hat': hat - yes; red - no; so cross.
- Give a colour-coded version first (nouns in one colour, small words in another), then plain text.
- Pairs do five sentences, then five new ones alone.
- Add a quantity drill: cards with 2, 3 or 4 objects and sentences 'There are three ...' to tick or cross. Number words are the single biggest source of her errors, so they get the most repetitions.
Success criterion. On a fresh five-sentence Part 1 task, 4/5 correct, and at least one correct cross that depends only on a number word and one that depends only on a preposition. If she hits 4/5 only when colours are involved, the checking routine has not generalised and needs another week.
3. Lina says the pictures are 'tricky' and is upset. What do you say to her and to her parents?
Read the worked answer
To Lina: reframe, do not comfort vaguely. The pictures are not tricky - there is nothing hidden in them. The task rewards careful reading of short sentences, and she can already read every word on the page. Show her the two she got right and how she got them, then show one she got wrong and find the small word together. That gives her something to do rather than something to feel.
To her parents: describe the decoding and the next step separately. After nine months she decodes at the expected level; the next step is sentence-level checking, and there is a concrete six-week target of 4/5 on Part 1 tasks. Avoid the word 'behind' - it is not supported by the evidence and it will not help her at home. Give them one thing to do: when she reads at home, ask 'was that true?' about one sentence per page.
Keep a note. If the pattern is unchanged after six weeks of targeted work, look again at attention and at vocabulary size before assuming a reading problem.