Hey all,
My 12 year old daughter is reading at a lexile score of 1550 (which puts her in the college age range as far as vocab/comp goes). In her school reading class, they are insisting that she read books at her lexile score. The problem is that so many books at that level--that are on themes that she is interested in--just aren't age appropriate. She may read and comprehend at a high level, but that doesn't make her emotionally mature enough to read a lot of what is out there. She is quite young in the maturity department (i.e. she still likes to play with dolls, is not at all interested in boys, would rather read than do just about anything else...)
She loves fantasy and adventure books and has devoured things like the Rick Riordan and J.K. Rowling series in the past. She read the Hunger Games series when it came out (early 09?), although that is emotionally challenging for the age. I've tried to encourage her to branch out into mystery, sci-fi, etc. with some success. She very much enjoyed Patricia Briggs' Mercedes Thompson series, but that has a lot of violence, some intimacy, and even a rape incident (we had some interesting conversations when she came to that book...eek). At least the main character is non-traditional and powerful (she is an auto-mechanic who owns her own shop).
She still enjoys reading things at a lower level (heck, I think we all do at times!), but we are trying to meet a school requirement here, so I'm a bit stumped.
Do any of you have suggestions for what she might read?
Oh gosh, this problem is so familiar to me! My DD age 10 has the same Lexile range as a high school junior. She is also very into fantasy like your daughter.
We keep heading to the Young Adult section of the library, and because fantasy seems to keep to pretty safe themes (though there can be a lot of violence which never troubled my daughter even when she was three), we are getting as many fantasy novels as possible. DD is almost through the Warrior series, and thank the Lord, appears to want to move onto the Seekers series next.
Okay, I have a few suggestions. Try to find a great series, or a prolific author, because that will save you a bit of time (we all know how quickly our HG kids devour books.)
Did you try the recent offerings from the British Isles? Perhaps the different perspective and different way of phrasing things might appeal to your daughter. I do remember from my childhood in Britain that books for children are revered over there, not to imply that they're not over here! Try browsing a bit on a current mum's website that discusses books.
Continuing in that vein, I bet there are some great foreign (German, French, Japanese etc.) translations of books that might be age-appropriate.
What are some current classics at the college level? Jack London, Nathaniel Hawthorne etc. are authors that come to mind. They can't be too racy, can they?
And finally there are the good old non-fiction offerings! I'm thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau etc. not to mention all those lovely science and history books in the library. You'd have control over the subject matter, and your daughter might really enjoy them.
Let me know what works! I'm right behind you in terms of where my daughter needs to go, and I've been thinking about this issue, too!
Here's some food for thought that makes one realize how serious this subject is.
My daughter just won her 4th grade spelling bee.
The first list that all 4th graders got was exceptionally difficult, but you'd think that a HG kid would know most of the words. However, I was surprised that my daughter didn't know a good 25 percent of them. Thanks to her exceptional memory, she learned them in 2 weeks, and then went on to the final.
It dawned on me later that she had had no exposure to "challenge" words (for her) all year, even in her gifted program. Hence, she had really learned no new vocabulary through her school.
Again, the importance of getting reading material at the right level!
Have you talked with the teacher about this? I think if they are going to insist that she read at her Lexile level, then they should also help her find appropriate books. It seems really silly, a case of following the letter of the rule and missing the spirit. The idea is to help people improve their reading skill by reading "just right" books. In your dd's case, there seems to be little need for her to improve since she has already reached a level higher than most adults.
And of course, even very few college-educated adults read college level reading material on a regular basis. I would hazard a guess that very few mystery and fantasy novels would meet this lexile requirement. And even most literature read in college is probably not a 1550. My only suggestion would be non-fiction and have her read journal articles on a subject of interest to her. But that may not appeal to her at all if she is looking for fantasy fiction! lol
Sorry we're not much help here. I would go to the school and insist that they either provide appropriate reading material or change their requirements.
Even Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, H. Rider Haggard, Daniel Defoe, and Charles Dickens aren't up at 1550. Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books, and Jules Verne are even further away. But they are all significantly closer to 1550 than what she has been reading so far, and she might enjoy them.
Do schools usually test reading level with Lexile level? My daughter was tested for her reading level but I was never given any scores or grade level. She is at the highest reading level in her class, where they group kids. She is a DYS kid.
There isn't much of anything in that range (1450-1600) that is age appropriate or even readable for a 12 year old. At that level it is mostly non-fiction, and rather dry prose at that.
I'd push back on the people who want her to read at her level to provide *you* a list of appropriate books. And then you can shoot down their choices based on theme or content.
A search on the Lexile website gives 22 "fantasy" books in that range, all of which are non-fiction, some about fantasy ("seeks new approaches to Guinevere's shadowed, negative image in the Arthurian legends"?) and a lot are misclassified (political psychoanalysis, economics...).
Asking for all categories and fiction only gives exactly 26 books. Pearl Buck, Joyce Carol Oates, Boccaccio (OK, *I* would totally have read the Decameron at 12), Cervantes, and... a few non-fiction essays/critiques.
Yep, have them run the search and then shoot down anything with explicit sex scenes or too much gore. This could be fun for you
Even Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, H. Rider Haggard, Daniel Defoe, and Charles Dickens aren't up at 1550.
Wait, there are two Walter Scott at 1560! Rob Roy and Bride of Lammermoor.
Wait, there are two Walter Scott at 1560! Rob Roy and Bride of Lammermoor.
Good find! Clearly, I gave up too soon, or the site I was searching glitched.
Wait, there are two Walter Scott at 1560! Rob Roy and Bride of Lammermoor.
The Bride of Lammermoor is... not too nice at the end. Insane and bloody in a wedding dress. A 12-year-old might like it, though. You could go see the opera.
Just so the sensitive are forewarned. I don't know Rob Roy.
DeeDee
We had the same problem when my daughter was that age. I agree with LNEsmom. I spoke with the teacher and asked that she read whatever she wanted to read. If it was for fun, she should not be reading textbooks.
The school allowed her to do this and it worked out well. She was able to read books that her friends were reading and she continued to enjoy reading.
The school literally did not have any books in the range she tested into.
I think the first thing to do is figure out exactly what Lexile 1550 is like, and see if there are any books that look good -
http://www.librarything.com/lexile/1550LTitles
1–25 of 474 ( next ) titles | shelf | covers title | author | popularity | Lexile
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford Paperbacks) by John D. Barrow
The European Reformation by Euan Cameron
We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (A Council on Foreign Relations Book) by John Lewis Gaddis
The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Sun-Tzu: The Art of War (History and Warfare) by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Catriona Kelly
Feminist Methods in Social Research by Shulamit Reinharz
Socrates: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by C. C. W. Taylor
Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany by Norma Broude
Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book) by David D. Hall
Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (Verso Classics, 2) by Perry Anderson
Queen Victoria: A Personal History by Christopher Hibbert
Japanese Culture by Paul Varley
Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley by Barry Levy
The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence by T. H. Breen
Complete Poetry (Oxford World's Classics) by Oscar Wilde
Feminism and History (Oxford Readings in Feminism) by Joan Wallach Scott
Content and Consciousness (International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method) by Daniel Dennett
This Stage-Play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580-1625 (OPUS) by Julia Briggs
Culture/Power/History by Nicholas B. Dirks
The Creative Suffering of God (Clarendon Paperbacks) by Paul S. Fiddes
Freedom within Reason by Susan Wolf
Poems: New and Selected by James Laughlin
Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction by Darko Suvin
Titles
26–50 of 474 ( prev | next ) titles | shelf | covers title | author | popularity | Lexile
War Before Civilization by Lawrence H. Keeley
Israel and the Bomb by Avner Cohen
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Opening Out) by Val Plumwood
Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art by Celia Rabinovitch
On Infantry: Revised Edition (Military Profession) by John A. English
World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (Norton Essays in American History) by Paul L. Murphy
Borders by Pat Mora
Was George Washington Really the Father of Our Country?: A Clinical Geneticist Looks at World History by Robert Marion
Russian folk belief by Linda J. Ivanits
Time in history : the evolution of our general awareness of time and temporal perspective by G. J. Whitrow
How Should One Live?: Essays on the Virtues by Roger Crisp
Understanding Japanese Society (Nissan Institute Routledge Japanese Studies Series) by Joy Hendry
Religion and the Enlightenment: From Descartes to Kant by James M. Byrne
The Great Depression and the New Deal (Greenwood Press Guides to Historic Events of the Twentieth Century) by Robert F. Himmelberg
Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender by Sheldon Hsia-Peng Lu
Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture by David Lyle Jeffrey
The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry by Marshall I. Goldman
Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis by Bernstein
The origins of war : from the Stone Age to Alexander the Great by Arther Ferrill
Orphans Of The Cold War America And The Tibetan Struggle For Survival by John Kenneth Knaus
Ground Forces for a Rapidly Employabel Joint Task Force: First-Week Capabilities for Short-Warning Conflicts by Eugene C Gritton
Cherokee Americans: The Eastern Band of Cherokees in the Twentieth Century (Indians of the Southeast) by John R. Finger
A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present by John R. Finger
Bond Men Made Free by Rodney Hilton
Making the connections: Essays in feminist social ethics by Beverly Wildung Harrison
Titles
51–75 of 474 ( prev | next ) titles | shelf | covers title | author | popularity | Lexile
The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939 by Deborah Cohen
The Fashion Business: Theory, Practice, Image (Dress, Body, Culture Series) by Nicola White
The modernist impulse in American Protestantism by William R. Hutchison
The Ownership Solution: Toward A Shared Capitalism For The 21st Century by Jeff Gates
Roman Philosophers by Mark Morford
Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States by Jack Salzman
The American Indian and the End of the Confederacy, 1863-1866 (Civil War) by Annie Heloise Abel
Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart (Institutional Structures of Feeling) by Helena Ragone
Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt by Debbie Nathan
The Roman War Machine (Medieval Military Library) by John Peddie
On Virtue Ethics by Rosalind Hursthouse
Why Era Failed: Politics, Women's Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution (Everywoman: Studies in History, by Mary Frances Berry
The Magic of the Many: Josiah Quincy and the Rise of Mass Politics in Boston, 1800-1830 by Matthew H. Crocker
Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Ernest Bloch Lectures) by Susan McClary
The dust rose like smoke : the subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux by James O. Gump
Art Forgery: The Case of the Lady of Elche by John F. Moffitt
Golden Peninsula: Culture and Adaptation in Mainland Southeast Asia (Shaps Library of Asian Studies) by Charles F. Keyes
Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology (Advances in Semiotics) by Richard J. Parmentier
Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation by Anthony O'Hear
Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion: With an Annotated Literal Translation of the Libretto by Michael Marissen
Kings and Prophets: Monarchic Power, Inspired Leadership, and Sacred Text in Biblical Narrative by Cristiano Grottanelli
The Italian Presence in American Art, 1760-1860 by Irma Jaffe
Women in medieval society by Irma Jaffe
Understanding Multivariate Research: A Primer for Beginning Social Scientists (Essentials of Political Science) by William Dale Berry
U.S. History As Women's History: New Feminist Essays (Gender and American Culture) by Alice Kessler-Harris
So one approach would be to send this list in to the teacher and ask her if she would help by suggesting one of these books to start with. Very Innocently.
So, I'm thinking that sometimes VG (very gifted) kids test higher than the level that they can perform at. This happened with my son at age 11, the test said he was 'more than ready' for algebra, but he wasn't able to handle even pre-algebra. I'd grab these books out of the library from the list above, or any other that you think might catch her fancy
Was George Washington Really the Father of Our Country?: A Clinical Geneticist Looks at World History by Robert Marion
Russian folk belief by Linda J. Ivanits
Time in history : the evolution of our general awareness of time and temporal perspective by G. J. Whitrow
How Should One Live?: Essays on the Virtues by Roger Crisp
Understanding Japanese Society (Nissan Institute Routledge Japanese Studies Series) by Joy Hendry
Religion and the Enlightenment: From Descartes to Kant by James M. Byrne
and leave 'em around for your child to 'find' and see if she finds them interesting. That will tell you quite a bit.
Best Wishes,
Grinity
FYI - many of the history books listed from Grinity - are academic and used in higher ed. (Stephanie Coontz, Chirstopher Hibbert, Joan Scott, Barry Levy, David Hall, Alice Kessler-Harris - are big historians). I recognize them from working on a PhD in history and being a former adjunct history instructor.
Some of the books may or may not appeal to your daughter if she's not into the topic or author's perspective/writing. Some have crossover appeal with a general audience though.
Have you tried the public library and readers' advisory for help? They can helpful for guiding you on appropriate content and material for an advanced reader.
Scholastic has a book wizard (
http://www.scholastic.com/bookwizard/) that may be useful as well.
Grinity's list is making me giggle. I think you should ask if the teacher will do a book club with her on these two:
Understanding Multivariate Research: A Primer for Beginning Social Scientists
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford Paperbacks) by John D. Barrow
For these kids, at this point, the Lexile is obviously not really a great measure for everyday reading. I'm pretty sure she doesn't want to read those books for pleasure. (Does she?) She should just read good, high-level literature that's also age-appropriate--probably, books that would be taught in high school but are on the tamer side in terms of content. Shakespeare could be a fun challenge if you'd like to stretch her. I enjoyed Ibsen's plays as a young high schooler.
I took a look at Scholastic book wizard, but forgot that it may not be enough for you with your daughter's reading level.
Barnes & Nobles has a way to find books by Lexile reading score - that's better.
(
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/reading-level-reading-books-lexile/search.asp). You enter a child's age, enter the Lexile score as 1600 or a range, select books (or textbooks or Nook), and then select topic or interest.
Another suggestion is to look at AP reading lists or googling terms like college reading list AND high school so you get lists like (
http://www.waldsfe.org/highschool/HAHS/hsbl.htm). Alternatively, you could find reading materials from college courses or typing in specific terms, such as 17th-century European witchcraft reading list or Harvard university history reading list.
I think it might be easier to find books of interest and then see if it matches a Lexile score - provided you're looking around AP, classics, or college-level lists.
One way to get around the dilemma with the advance reading is to see if the teacher allows your daughter to bring in materials from home or public library - rather than sticking with what's in a classroom or school.
Agreed Ultramarina! At this point, declare her a successful reader and allow her to enjoy herself!
Well, thanks Ultramarina and Ellipses. I'm a librarian and say this all the time, but teachers can get hung up with phonics, Lexile scores, content, topic, writing styles, test scores, and an end game or some preconceived result from reading.
I've had battles with my son's private gifted school over it too. He's 6.5 years old and reading at a 4/5th grade level. I just want him to enjoy reading, period, and not something he may dread or view as a chore.
I say there's a reason both children and adults love Roald Dahl's books. The writing and humor are superb and you can escape into another world.
Yet there's also a reason why authors like Malcolm Gladwell make it to the bestseller's list and sell millions of books. They give us ideas or information or challenge the way we think, yet be enjoyable to read at the same time.
I know this may be an odd question - but what do they do in a school reading class when a child is 12 years old? Our schools don't really have "reading classes" - they have silent reading independent times anywhere from 15-30 minutes during the day through elementary, but there is no work required out of that time - it's mostly used as a way of letting everyone calm down and regroup after lunch/recess. Our kids have language arts and humanities classes in elementary and secondary school that have a significant load of reading core to the class but the whole class (or groups within the class) read the same books to have the same background knowledge and incorporate the reading into group discussion/projects etc - so there's reading involved but the intent isn't developing reading as a skill. English classes focus on grammar and writing.
Sorry - didn't mean to get off track, but I'm just curious about it.
FWIW we have had and continue to have the same struggle with our ds and finding fiction for him to read for pleasure. He's also picky about what he will read.. which makes it even more challenging! In your situation, I agree with the others who suggested having the school find books to select from. If her teacher can't help, perhaps the librarian can?
Best wishes,
polarbear
With the Lexile process, there are questions to answer about the books they read. Part of their grade is based on their scores on these tests.
When my daughter (now in 9th) was in sixth, they all read books together as well as independent reading (Lexile).
With the Lexile process, there are questions to answer about the books they read. Part of their grade is based on their scores on these tests.
So is the sole purpose of the class to develop reading skills? I'm just surprised that reading is a subject in 9th grade - it's long fallen by the wayside as a subject by the time kids hit middle school in the schools we are in (as well as the schools I grew up in).
Thanks for filling me in!
polarbear
Lexile reading is for sixth grade. They still read, though, in 9th grade. My daughter's class read "Romeo and Juliet" this year and are finishing "To Kill a Mockingbird" together. Much of this is for comprehension at this point. This is Honors English and I agree that they are reading mostly below what my daughter can read.
In Middle School here, there is an English and Reading class. In high school, it is just called English.