Crash Course: Reading Levels

In which we clarify the basics and dig into what we should actually do with this information.

My husband and I have started touring elementary schools for our elder son, who will be in pre-K next school year, and the experience has reminded me, yet again, how much parents are expected to know about Education (the system, the lingo, the ways we learn…).

I joked when I was newly postpartum that I needed a medical degree to become a parent. Even when my first child was an infant, as an 8th grade teacher, I was grateful to have a graduate degree in Education and years of classroom experience as I realized how truly frustrating it must be for the parents who are trying to navigate elementary, middle, and high school with years of education and expertise in a field unrelated to primary and secondary schooling.

So, welcome to Book Party’s Crash Course series. We’ll dive into topics that you may feel like you should fully understand but nobody actually ever told you about.

Book Party On!

Clarkie

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As I write about reading levels today, I write for those of you who may need another perspective, those who need their feelings validated, and for those who have no idea what a reading level is or why we should be talking about them. If you find you still have questions, please start a conversation in the comments or send me an email at hello@readingandwritingmatters.com.

I know it’s a lot, but here’s the gist:

1. Reading levels were developed by companies to help teachers, and there isn’t just one system for leveling books. Because of this, leveling readers is tricky; reading levels aren’t always accurate and should never be the only tool used to determine where your child is on their reading journey.

2. We never want reading levels to to a) shame children or b) limit what our children read.

3. In order to help our children to love reading AND read anything they want without the inability to comprehend as an obstacle, my v. short advice is: separate academic and pleasure reading. Scroll down to the end if you just want to read this part.

A note: If you read through this and start to feel like your child’s school doesn’t approach reading levels the way you wish they would — we should not jump straight to blaming teachers. Many, MANY teachers have no control over what they have to push in their classrooms. One of the things I love to do is talk to parents about teachers’ possible perspectives and help them navigate productive conversations. I like to assume we’re all doing our best; I'm here to help you, if you need support.

TO BEGIN:

There is not just one system for leveling books. 

Some (of many) popular book leveling methods are:

📖 Guided Reading (Fountas & Pinnell) – This system was developed by two women who have sold their Balanced Literacy curriculum to teachers and schools across the country.

Sidebar: Because of the popularity of Balanced Literacy, a lot of children haven’t actually been taught to read. No matter how old your children are, if you haven’t yet, I recommend you listen to the American Public Media podcast “Sold a Story.” You’ll learn about the Science of Reading vs Balanced Literacy. We can talk about it, too.

The F&P leveling system ranges from A-Z+ for K-8 grade. According to the company, levels are determined by: Genre/Form, Text Structure, Content, Themes and Ideas, Language and Literary Features, Sentence Complexity, Vocabulary, Words, Illustrations, and Book and Print Features.

📖 Lexile – Most of the focus here is on vocabulary and sentence complexity. Lexile levels range from 0L to above 1600L. 

📖 Accelerated Reader – These levels correspond with grade levels and are determined by length of book and word/sentence complexity. 

So, we need to remember that multiple companies (yes, companies are the ones who have created reading levels to accompany curricula or attempt to make it easier for educators to assess student growth) have their own ways of leveling books, so only paying attention to a single number or a letter when helping your child select a book is not your safest bet. We should never limit our children access to books based on a level. 

Because there are different ways to level books, you can see how leveling the people who read them is tricky and can even be problematic. If you took the SAT or ACT twice in a similar span of time in high school, do you think you would have gotten the exact same score? I wouldn’t have. I did way better on the day I didn’t care because I was preoccupied with the party I was throwing that night. Text anxiety is real and comes into play with reading levels. Trust the human, not the reading level test.

LET’S LOOK AT AN  EXAMPLE OF A BOOK: 

The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas is a Young Adult book that I used in my 8th grade classroom. I had parents sign a permission slip before we started reading, as the book (like many YA titles) contains foul language and mature content. It's a book that can be controversial, but it is used appropriately in 8th grade classrooms across the country (public and private schools alike). 

If you look up the reading level for THUG on Scholastic's Book Wizard, you'll see that:

📖  the Guided Reading Level is Z+ (the most advanced level in their K-8 leveling system); 

📖 the Lexile is HL590L  (which means "High Interest, Low Level”); 

📖 and the Accelerated Reader level is 3.9, which falls in the third grade year. 

Yikes. Looking at the numbers, it seems like this is a “mature” book written at a low level. Where’s the use in that? Well, there’s plenty. (We care about nuance here!)

This is what we should remember: 

📖 Some Z/Z+ books may not be a good fit for advanced 5th grade readers (because they may be Z/Z+ because of content rather than sentence complexity and vocabulary), but others are (like Little Women, for example); 

📖 some lower Lexile books are filled with opportunities for nuanced discussion and pair well with nonfiction texts that aren't as engaging or maybe don't seem as relevant on their own, and we shouldn't overlook their value (hello THUG); 

📖 cultural context is not always taken into account by the leveling process; not every child is ready to handle the same material at the same time;

📖 similarly, background knowledge matters — your child may get a very high lexile score after reading passages about something they know a lot about, or a very low score reading passages they know little about (even if the passages are at the “same level”);

📖 a reading test doesn’t measure a child’s emotional maturity or content knowledge in every subject; the 20-minute F&P Guided Reading test will not evaluate which Z+ books your child is emotionally or socially ready to read.

THE DEAL:

Allegedly, students were never supposed to know their reading levels, but that's not what happened. It sounds dramatic, but publicly giving middle and high school students a label related to their reading level isn’t motivating (at best) or healthy (at worst) for most children.

So, what do you do with this information? If you have your child’s reading level in the form of a Lexile number or Guided Reading level (or whatever!), you can certainly use it to begin to help you find books for your child. Generally, it can help you get a sense of where your child is compared to what’s expected for their grade level, but it’s not information you need to seek. Again, reading levels were created for teachers to assess and modify their instruction accordingly.

But what’s best for parents (and other caring grownups) to use to find the right books for their children? If your child has books they know they love, use those books to start conversations (with booksellers, friends, librarians, the internet, me…) to find readalikes. If you’re trying to develop a non-reader into a reader — or revive the former reader that they once were — you’re still going to want to let your child lead the way. Once they can narrow down a form and genre, pick a few with varying levels of complexity and let them decide what feels right. (And please, please don’t make them finish a for-fun book they aren’t into. It’s trial and error here!)

BEFORE YOU PANIC:

If your child’s teacher says the words “reading level,” I do not want you to throw up a red flag and march to the principal’s office or start to research homeschooling.

The red flag situations? You’ll want to start a conversation with the school if reading levels are posted publicly, or if children are marching around feeling smug or slinking away feeling less than because individual reading levels are made to be everyone’s business or are used to shame.

But it’s OK — and even good! — if you’re hearing your child’s teacher say to you in a private conference that they have a low reading level or that they aren’t trying to push themselves to get to a higher reading level (even if it’s already high). It’s about how we approach where they are and where they’re going that matters.

Remember, you can ask your child’s teacher what the leveling system they use is — and/or what goes into determining said level. (Some teachers may even just use the term “reading level” without one of these formal tests in mind; they may be using their professional knowledge to assess where your child is.)

We will have a Book Party Crash Course on comprehension (what goes into it and how you can help your child boost their skills) at a later date!

I also want you to rest easy thinking about how we don’t all give a numbered or lettered reading level to a group chat when deciding our next book club read. Reading levels aren’t forever, but it’s expected that our children do move from lower to higher reading levels (using whatever vocabulary you choose to define it) as they grow. This is good! We just want to talk about it in a way that says, “Hey, let’s help you continue to learn and grow and not feel like you are unable to read something because it’s too hard!”

YOU CAME FOR THEORY, YEAH?

Too hard isn’t fun. But learning is! So, we need to help our children stay within what’s called their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). This is the space — coined by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky — where the learning happens. It’s that magic place where there’s enough of a challenge but not so much challenge that they want to give up. In order to grow, readers need a little bit of productive struggle.

In a perfect world, all teachers will provide each student with reading material within their zone of proximal development to allow for that beautiful productive struggle that will keep them challenged and happy. For many reasons, this doesn’t always happen. But we can help!

ACADEMIC vs PLEASURE READING

Here’s where I (finally) get to my advice for those of you who want to help your children read more complex texts but don’t want to squash their love for reading.

We want to protect reading for fun. Academic reading and reading for fun are not the same thing. OK, OK, maybe for some people they are! But generally speaking, they have their own lanes. Help your child protect their pleasure reading! Always keep it fun. Never make it a chore. Do not say, “No, you can’t read that book anymore; you’re too old for it now.” Or anything that sounds like, “You’re better than that book.” Again, we don’t bash a book club pick because the book isn’t challenging to read! (Can you imagine?!) We can still have robust discussions about joyful “easy” reads. We can also celebrate the comfort a favorite reread or genre brings us – and we can keep it all to ourselves. We – you, me, all of our children – are entitled to these reading experiences.

You also can — and I encourage you to — talk to your child about how challenged they feel (or don’t feel) when they are reading a particular book. Help them discover what’s too hard (for now), and find their Goldilocks reading situation. We aren’t going to force them to read every book in this zone, though. We’re protecting the fun!

I want you to think of “pushing them” to read more challenging books as academic reading. If your child needs extra support — or enrichment — and you want to support what’s happening at school, I strongly encourage you to introduce more challenging academic reading in small chunks. Maybe this looks like reading short stories or narrative nonfiction articles together about topics that interest them, and then gradually releasing them to read them on their own. (The comments section is going to be THE PLACE to talk about this stuff. We can work through your specific situation together!)

You can also invite them to read more challenging books, which is a gentle nudge with their pleasure reading: offer books like the ones they love that are a step up when it comes to text complexity. Be delicate here! Leave one at their seat at the breakfast table with a “thought of you!” note on it. Watch book trailers together. Start reading a book aloud; you can read the whole thing aloud, or see if they’ll want to finish it on their own. Think of exposure rather than pushing. If they aren’t into your suggestions or hints, that’s OK.

Soon, we will dive into what goes into developing reading comprehension, and I’ll offer more concrete suggestions for helping your child tackle more complex texts.

For now: Congratulations, you passed the crash course!

Paid Subscribers: Let’s Party!

I’m mixing my metaphors a little bit here, but courses can be parties, too, yeah? Anyways, now, we party. For extra credit? Am I taking it too far?

Let me know how I can help. Need specific recommendations? Have clarifying questions? Need help handling a situation at your child’s school?

If you’re willing to work through your questions for all VIP Subscribers to see, let’s do it in the comments! If you’d rather do it individually, click here.