We pretty much had to chalk Lexile appropriateness up to the humor genre all by itself when we looked at what our 8yo "should" be reading, according to her Lexile level.
I drew the line with Flaubert. Appropriate Lexile or not, she was
not reading
Madame Bovary at eight.
In other words, while this kind of measure seems useful and helpful for many children, those who are less far from typical synchronous development tend to not have this be a very helpful measure of what is appropriate. Friends whose child is developmentally delayed have also found this to be a problem-- their high schooler is NOT particularly interested in reading about the adventures of four to seven year old children with their puppy... which is exactly the same problem that we faced. Or its mirror twin, I suppose.
So no. We did not find this particularly useful. Instead, we used her apparent interest level, and basically explained to DD that the best way to "grow" her literacy was to have her reading books that she had to THINK about-- those with longer, more complicated sentences, words that she had to figure out the meanings for, that kind of thing. That books like Captain Underpants and Magic Treehouse were fine-- but rather like Pringles potato chips-- tasty, but not an adequate complete diet.
She was very capable by 6 or 7y, of determining what an appropriate challenge looked like there. I stopped tracking it when she was about ten, and quit screening anything she read at about 11 or so. I did think that some of the things that she was reading at 9-13yo might have been a bit much, but she seemed to enjoy them, and she and I talked about them, book club style.
