I just wanted to bring this post back up because of something I recently discovered that makes my advice here very bad.
My K kid was reading O-P guided reading level books on her own this year & instead of putting her in a reading group, the teacher suggested she read to me. She hated reading those "big" books out loud, but I thought she needed that level to practice the K reading skills that the other kids were learning (advanced phonics, using context clues, realizing when you don't understand a word or concept, etc.).
At some point another teacher gave her some short, educator-designed nonfiction books to bring home that had unfamiliar words and situations and met the guidelines that I was looking for without having small print. She ate those up.
We talked about the differences and together we figured out that she wasn't enjoying reading books with small print unless it was okay for her just to get the "gist" of it, which she couldn't do reading to me.
Because it's not the length of the book that matters but the size of the text, I also look for large print books to give her. (She has and loves a large print Pippi Longstocking, for example.)
Last week she checked a whole bunch of Annie and Snowball books out of the library. She was reading those when she was a young 4. But she likes them, so okay...
When my 6 year old daughter abruptly stopped reading O-P Level books a few months ago, we had a discussion and she said the print was too small. I decided maybe I had been unintentionally pushing and stopped encouraging her to read those books.
A couple of days ago we got her new glasses. Wow. She spent the whole weekend reading pretty much everything in the house. THAT was the issue. She couldn't see. Anyway, she's now requesting novels again.
What I learned is that when sometimes a child stops doing something, there IS something wrong. And I will never again assume it's just because she's reading books a kindergartner really shouldn't be reading and that I should just let her have fun where she's at.
