More questions about reading levels

[Rivka]

I'm keeping a list of the books my 5yo reads for her portfolio, and to make it seem more "official" for the state's purposes :rolleyes: I want to include some measure of reading level. She has mostly been reading her way through the Beginner Books series from Dr. Seuss & friends: Go Dog Go, Are You My Mother, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut, etc.

 

I had been pulling up grade level equivalents from Scholastic BookWizard, and then someone here recommended using Lexiles instead so I looked up the Lexile numbers too. Now I am completely confused.

 

The numbers don't seem to bear any relation to each other; for example, Green Eggs and Ham (Seuss, of course) and Mouse Soup (Lobel) are both rated grade 2.2, but Green Eggs and Ham has a Lexile of 30 and Mouse Soup is 240. Mouse Tales is very similar to Mouse Soup in my opinion, but its Lexile rating is 200 points higher.

 

This morning my daughter read a very simple book (It's Not Easy Being a Bunny) and it's listed as grade level 3.3 and Lexile 590. That doesn't make any sense at all - it's much easier than many books which are a full grade and 250 Lexile points lower. On the other hand, I looked at a list of titles of very, very low Lexile books (under 50) and saw words in the titles that I would consider to be more complicated to sound out: In Our Country, Simpson Snail Sings, etc. Is the rating system not based on phonetic difficulty?

 

Then there's the leveling of the I-Can-Read series. A Picture for Harold's Room is a "preschool" reading level? Really? It has a Lexile level of 310 and a grade level of 2.3, but the little circle on the front of the book says "Preschool" clear as day. I'm just torturing myself trying to make sense of this, aren't I?

 

So, my questions are: do reading levels make any sense at all? Is it even worth keeping track of them? Is there anything to take away from this whole exercise other than "she's reading just fine for her age"?

 

And how do you find new books at an appropriate level if the leveling systems are all so weird? I like to keep a basket of books for her to choose from, but once we've finished the Beginner Book series (which are very reliably at her level) I don't know how to choose books that will be comfortable to read.

[EKS]

Lexile level is based on the rarity of the words used, how often words are repeated, and on sentence length. I'm pretty sure that it has nothing to do with how difficult a text is phonetically. Indeed, the rarer a word is, the more likely it is to be phonetically regular.

 

Some books that are fairly easy to decode have higher Lexile levels that expected because they have long sentences. In fact, I once used the Lexile analyzer (on their website) to analyze a chapter of a Magic Tree House book as written (MTH is notorious for its itty bitty sentence fragments). I then put the short sentences/fragments together to make more natural sentences. I did not add any words except for things like and or but. The Lexile level was 200 points higher.

 

I like the Scholastic Reading Counts website for leveling information. They include Lexile level as well as a few other levels. Used together, you can get a pretty accurate picture of the level of a book.

 

Leveling information seems to fall apart at the lower end. I think a big reason is that the leveling rubrics assume that kids are learning to read using the sight word approach. For a kid who has been taught phonics, especially those who are impervious to repetition, it can be pretty hard to read some of the mainstream beginning readers.

 

I've found that leveling information seems to be fairly accurate in the grade 2, 3, and 4 range. It starts to fall apart after about grade 5 because so many books targeted to adults are at about a 5th or 6th grade reading level (850 or so Lexile).

 

Don't worry, by the time you're on the other side of this, you'll be able to glance at a book and be able to determine its grade level with a frightening degree of accuracy!

[JessieKat]

When it comes to boosting my child's reading level, I try to use my best judgment. I eliminate the maturity of the material because I've seen some rather ADULT material with simplistic writing.

 

In terms of reading for enjoyment, I have my child read whatever he likes -- no matter how simplistic or advanced. The mandatory reading material (which I provide to him often) is around the same grade level or a grade level higher. I judge a piece of literature by the number of pages, the number of words, and the usage of advanced vocabulary. I always make sure to read the material before passing it off to him. If I don't read it, I'm DO skim it and I read the book in full along side him. So far, so good. His reading has improved exponentially in just one year. Mind you, he was stuttering over his words around that time and his vocabulary was pretty slim.