Reading Levels: Using them to help kids get hooked on reading

Our Berkeley Unified teachers have just completed five days of conferences with parents, and I wanted to follow up with a librarian's perspective on recommending books for kids.

Our teachers do a remarkable job individually assessing students' reading levels to gauge their progress, development and challenges. At each conference, they let parents know how their children are developing and what level they have reached. But what do parents do with this level?

Reading to stuffies happens every day in our library

Reading levels are only useful if they can help guide children toward books that are enjoyable, interesting and appropriate for a child at that point in their reading life. I do not label my books with reading levels, and I have compared different systems enough to know that they conflict much of the time. And yet, published reading levels are helpful as a starting place if you don't know a book.

Our teachers use Fountas & Pinnell levels, which take into account a book's vocabulary, sentence length and text structure. While classrooms have leveled libraries, how do parents help direct kids at home, the library or the bookstore? My best advice is to figure out what has worked well for your child, both in terms of interest and complexity, and build on that.

Ultimately, we need to ask our children to take charge in figuring out if a book is working for them. I always ask kids to open a book, read a little and see how it feels. But I know that kids need a starting place, a way to narrow the field so they can choose from a set of books that might work. That's where reading levels and recommended lists can help.

At this year's conferences, we shared recommended reading lists which used reading levels to help direct kids and parents. Feel free to download these or share them with teachers and families in your schools.

• Kindergarten (very beginning to read, levels C-E)
• 1st grade (beginning to read & early chapter books, levels D-M)
• 2nd grade (early readers & chapter books, levels H-P)
• 3rd grade (short chapter books & novels, easy nonfiction, levels K-P)
• 4th grade (novels & high interest nonfiction, levels O-T)
• 5th grade (longer novels & nonfiction, levels S-W)

You'll notice that the grade levels are not included on the reading lists. Many teachers wanted to be able to use these for kids based on their reading levels, not based on the student's grade.

Finally, we shared several brochures from the wonderful Jim Trelease. My favorite is Ten Facts Parents Should Know About Reading. As he writes,

"We humans are pleasure-seekers, doing things over and over if we like it. We go to favorite restaurants and order the food and beverages we like, not the stuff we hate. So if you want to ensure children visit "reading" more often, make sure they like it more than they hate it. How do we get them to like it that much? Read on."

Friends have fun reading together!

Many thanks go to all the students at Emerson for helping me test out so many books. If you make a purchase using the Amazon links on this site, a small portion goes to Great Kid Books. Thank you for your support.

©2014 Mary Ann Scheuer, Great Kid Books