Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School High Lexile Level Books for young readers

true but i think i read that the average adult (not US of course lol) reads on an 8th grade or lower level!

my kids are both voracious readers. this is a very annoying obstacle. i can imagine if you had a child that wasn't interested in reading this would only make it worse for them!

maybe i should tell the kids to take a dive on the next Lexile test so they can read what they want! :P

also, like i said before, it does give the teacher an easy way to differentiate for reading in the class. One child is doing Diary of a Wimpy Kid, another The Hobbit, but all working on the same book report project. I don't know, i mostly just think it's annoying!

Which is a level 1000-1100L, and precious few of the books I read for fun (mostly genre fiction) go higher than that.

I tried to feed a few of the fiction books from the "what are you reading?" thread into Lexile. There is very little there (they haven't leveled a song of fire and ice?!?), and their book finder has pretty much nothing above 1500 anyway. Looks like only juvenile and YA editors bother to get their books leveled.

AntsyPants: not a solution, because I think they have to read within 150 points of their level (-100, +50).

Here is the funny thing. Our school uses DRA rather than Lexile, and they don't test (or rather they last tested in May, at which point my DS7 was supposedly below a lexile 200 in English). The last book he read independently at home was a lexile 700. He doesn't test well, but I also noticed something of a trend in his Accelerated Reader reports: if the book is way below his level he tends to score worse. The more challenging the book (and I picked that 700L book -- shorter, written bigger than the 590L books he currently reads with his father -- as an easier independent read, which shows how... unintuitive leveling is) the better he does on the quizzes. Weird?

Have you tried Scholastic's Book wizard ? http://www.scholastic.com/bookwizard/
If you use the advanced search, you can search by genre, interest etc. Just a thought

This has a lot of great suggestions:

http://www.examiner.com/gifted-children-in-national/info-101-book-list-for-young-gifted-readers

My kid too!

When we got DS's lexile results sent home, it came with instructions on how to find books in his range using the book wizard I think. The most important thing is to just name ONE or two categories of what you like. I made the mistake of naming lots of categories, and got a list with way too much variety...in other words, it didn't help me choose. So I picked "fantasy" only and got a nice list. Picking fantasy and adventure and science fiction and science and history was the wrong way to do it, even though DS is interested in all those things.

Have you tried that Antsy-Pantsy?

And don't forget (since our kids go to the same school) that you have to write a permission slip if the books are YA.

yes, i did this with his age and picking fantasy and it gave me 3 books. one was the book he was reading that had some mature content in the end that I felt he wasn't ready for. At his age and lexile it's pretty slim pickin's.

DS doesn't take books from the media center, I pick them up at used book stores and the library usually so I haven't had to write a permission slip.

you have all given me some good ideas though so I will investigate. He is done with his required reading for this quarter and I have some time to gather suggestions for him for next quarter.