Can I Read That Book?! How to Choose Age Appropriate Books for Your Child

How do you know what is Age Appropriate for your Child to Read?
By Daniel Pennington, School Age Teacher at Kids R Kids Avalon Park, Orlando’s best day care center with 3+ acre campus & award winning curriculum.

A great example came from Scholastic article and it goes like this:

Consider this: A father takes his son to the store to buy some shoes. The salesperson asks, “What kind of shoes do you need?” The father replies, “He needs basketball shoes.” As the salesperson leads them to the basketball shoes, he asks, “How old is your son?” The father answers, “He is 12.” So the salesperson points to five pairs of shoes on the wall and says, “There are our age 12 basketball shoes.” (Scholastic: A Professional Paper, 2008)

When choosing reading material for our children we normally either give them books that interest them or sometimes we even just give them a book just to have them try and read it. But reading the example above, just as we know that a 12 year old may not have a size 12 shoe, we cannot assume that children, who can read words fully, comprehend the literature in their reading material. There are many factors in determining what Age Appropriate is for our children. In this article I will discuss one of those factors.

As teachers we base our grading scale for age appropriate reading levels using Lexiles. Lexiles are scale measurements that measure text difficulty and reading ability (Scholastic: A Professional Paper, 2008). When we analyze Lexiles we as educators look at two areas in literature construction: Semantic difficulty and Syntactic difficulty (Hiebert & Pearon, 2010, p. 6). According to Hiebert & Pearson (2010) Semantic difficulty refers to the frequency of the text in a database (paragraph) and Syntactic difficulty refers to sentence length (p. 6) . Being aware of Lexiles can help you as a parent or teacher because determining reading appropriate material for your child can lower frustration and can help scaffold their reading ability as they progress when they get older encouraging them to be better self-regulated readers.

Here are two strategies I have learned at the University of Central Florida when determining age appropriate reading levels for K-12 children:

1. Take a page from the book you want your child to read. Next glance through and count approximately how many paragraphs are in that page. Next, look at the font of the page (larger letters are for younger reading age groups; small for more advanced readers). Afterwards, take a look at the syllable count for the words in the paragraph? Are the words 1 or 2 syllables? Shorter syllables make it easier for younger children to read. Syllables help organize the semantics in learning literacy. Finally, take a look at sentence length? Are the sentences long where there is too much detail, or are they short for younger children to quickly understand. A large amount of pictures determine the low reading level of the book also (younger children need visualization when correlating text to images).

2. If your child has taken a Standardized Test in school, then they give you a Grade-equivalent Score for your child according to a statewide assessment. Grade-equivalent Score is defined by Woolfolk (2011) as a “Measure of grade level based on comparison with norming samples from each grade” (p. 637). If you look on your child’s score you might find a number that looks like this: 3.7

This is how you interpret this number:
– The whole number determines what grade level their reading level is (Woolfolk, 2011, p. 637). So this 3 means 3rd grade.
– The decimal stands for the tenths of a year which is interpreted in months (Woolfolk, 2011, p. 637). This means your child has a reading level around the month of February in the 3rd grade since the date of the test.

I am hoping that this information can help you, either as a teacher or parent, select an appropriate book so that the next time before you give a child reading material, you can quickly determine whether or not that it is appropriate for your child.

Works Cited Hiebert, E., & Pearon, P. D. (2010). An Examination of Current Text Difficulty Indices with Early Reading Texts. Santa Cruz: Text Project Inc.
Scholastic: A Professional Paper. (2008, March). Lexiles: A System for Measuring Reader Ability and Text Difficulty. New York, New York, United States: Scholastic Inc.
Woolfolk. (2011). Educational Psychology. Boston: Pearson.