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The topic of reading levels is always contentious for librarians, educators, booksellers, and authors. A recent article by author Sergio Ruzzier argued against the merits of using reading levels to determine which book is right for a child. In this guest post, author and bookseller Rosanne Parry offers her thoughts on why reading levels can be valuable, despite some of the drawbacks. Welcome, Rosanne!

Reading levels posted on trade fiction for children are a bit of a hot-button issue for those who work in the book world and periodically I hear calls for their complete abolition.  I agree that people use reading levels on books unwisely all the time. I believe that in general kids ought to have the widest possible access to the books they choose for themselves. I think there are many mistaken assumptions about what those reading levels mean. However there are useful purposes for reading levels on books.

I started my career as a teacher with a specialty in reading. I did most of my work with learning disabled students. If you are choosing books to use in school for instruction with children who are struggling, then keeping them within the parameters of a book that is just challenging enough but not too frustrating gives optimal progress toward reading fluency. An accurate reading level, manageable book length, accessible font, generous leading and kerning, and affordable price all help a teacher choose useful material for each student.

The temptation to make reading instruction leak over into at-home recreational reading is very strong for a highly motivated parent who is ashamed of a child’s low reading level or overly impressed with a high one. Sometimes this prompts a parent to steer their child away from high quality books that would be developmentally appropriate and captivating, and push them toward books that are decodable but outside the child’s emotional sphere and therefore not very engaging.

Most of the reading levels that publishers put on books are there as a shelving aid for booksellers, rather than a prescription for readers. They have almost nothing to do with the readability of the text and much more to do with the maturity of the content. To be perfectly honest, the vast majority of adult books are written at a 5th-6th grade reading level. The current literary fashion is toward a plain-spoken prose style and simple sentence structure.  This drives down the reading level of adult books. But it doesn’t make adult content in a book appropriate for children.

Here’s an example of where I think the publisher’s reading level is helpful. Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit is a short novel about a seven-year old girl. At first glance a bookseller might just toss it on the shelf with Clementine and Captain Underpants. Fortunately, the reading level says 7th grade and up (12+ years). It’s a story about the atrocities of WWII. The seven-year old girl is a fugitive on the run with an adult of dubious motives. She steals from battlefield corpses; she is raped; the ending is ambiguous and not particularly hopeful. It’s a stunning piece of writing and will likely be in the buzz come book award time and rightly so. Nevertheless it’s not a book that serves a second grader well. The reading level helps us get the book in the right spot in our store and because it’s at a discrepancy with the outward appearance of the book, it encourages us to read the whole book and figure out where to best recommend it.

Sometimes we decide to ignore the reading level on a book. When we got Symphony for the City of the Dead by M.T. Anderson last year, we opted to ignore the grade level recommendations and shelve it in adult history where our avid World War II buffs and professional musicians were most likely to find it. It would be less work for the bookseller to shelve all of an author’s work in one spot. But if the author is Ursula LeGuin or Suzanne Collins or Neil Gaiman, the reader is better served by having the adult, young adult, middle grade, and chapter books shelved in separate areas.

Reading levels are one tool among many a bookseller can use. Even in a small bookshop we get in hundreds of new books a week in addition to the classics we always carry. There’s no way even a cohort of dozens of booksellers can analyze every book we carry. So I’m glad there’s a reading level marker that we can use or ignore as we see fit. I’d love for it to be in a magical ink that only a bookseller can see, but until then, part of a booksellers job is to help anxious parents feel good about the quality of books their child is choosing and help them anticipate other books that will give their family joy.

About Rosanne Parry:  Rosanne Parry is the author for four middle grade novels from Random House, including her most recent title, The Turn of the Tide. She has been an elementary teacher and is now a part-time book monger at the legacy indie bookstore Annie Blooms. She also teaches children’s and YA literature in the Masters in Book Publishing program at Portland State University. She lives in Portland, Oregon and writes in a treehouse in her back yard.  You can find out more about her online here.

Further Reading:
Lexile: A Bookseller’s Best Friend or Worst Enemy?

5 Strategies to Help Parents Navigate Lexile

7 Strategies to Help Booksellers and Librarians Navigate Lexile

I recently found myself facing the dreaded task of packing up my entire classroom. Trying to see this as an opportunity to reduce the number of boxes labeled only with question marks, I sorted through papers and miscellany, recycling and tossing with gusto. Math papers that I never used? Recycled without a second thought. A plastic bag filled with a mixture of sequins? Donated to the art closet. I was slimming down my classroom materials without remorse…until I came to the last section: my classroom library.

My classroom library is, as I believe nearly all libraries are, a thing of beauty. Eighteen categorized sections and counting, displayed in neat baskets or arranged in an orderly fashion on the shelves. But now, as I pictured having to lift and carry all of these boxes out of my classroom, the sheer quantity of books daunted me. Surely, there were some books that I could leave behind or donate.

For some people, the task of sifting through those books may have been as simple as I found paring down my papers to be. But for me, a lifelong saver and hoarder of books, this was a challenge of near-mythic proportions. Almost since I learned how to read, I’ve been a rescuer of books discarded from libraries, a purchaser of those books on the “last chance” shelves. I simply cannot stand the thought of a book floating around unread, unloved, and without a shelf to call home.

In the past, as I’ve tried to pare down my own collection of books, I’ve struggled to discard titles unless I vehemently hate them (a feeling I rarely experience). But I was determined to make a good-faith effort to look through each of my classroom bins with a critical eye.

I sat down on the hard, scratched tile floor in my nearly-bare classroom and started going through my books, bin by bin, looking for outcasts that I could discard. As I sifted through the books in each category, I found books in need of repair, which I set aside to add to my “book hospital” bin, but the “consider discarding” pile remained especially lean a couple hours into the project.

As I sorted, I tried to consider what criteria might help me determine if it was time to toss a book. I was vaguely operating with the assumption that I would consider discarding books that were older and featured dated information, centered around very obscure topics, or were lackluster or unlikely to spark student engagement. But soon I found myself making exceptions to these rules — for classics and especially for books about weird topics, since you never know what book is going to pique the interest of a reluctant reader.

I’m sure you can see where this going. By the end of the day, I had several books to repair with packing tape and a small pile of eleven to discard — mostly books that contained false information (though I kept some of those, too, to show students that knowledge evolves.) I couldn’t bear the thought of a future student saying to me, “Do we have any books in our library about…?” and then thinking of a book that I’d left behind at one point in time.

So when it came time to move everything, I happily heaved all of those boxes of books and transported them across the state line, still contemplating when, if ever, it would feel okay to get rid of books.

The post Trimming down a classroom library appeared first on The Horn Book.

Jaclyn DeForge, our Resident Literacy Expert, began her career teaching first and second grade in the South Bronx, and went on to become a literacy coach and earn her Masters of Science in Teaching. In her column she offers teaching and literacy tips for educators.

When the Common Core Standards were created, the authors included a list of titles in Appendix B that exemplified the level of text complexity (found in Appendix A) and inherent quality for reading materials at each grade level.  This list was intended as a comparative tool, as a way for teachers and administrators to measure current libraries against country-wide expectations for rigorous literature and informational text.  Since its publication, this list, and the titles included and omitted, have created quite a bit of controversy.

Two things are fairly obvious when considering the texts included in Appendix B:

1. Most of the titles were first published ages ago.
2. Most of the titles are by white people.  Or about white people.  It’s a pretty white list.

Two things are also fairly important when constructing a classroom library and when selecting texts for instruction:

1. Students should have the opportunity to be exposed to both classic and contemporary literature as well as  nonfiction texts.
2. All students should have the opportunity to see themselves reflected back, as well as to be exposed to cultures and experiences that may differ from their own, in the literature and nonfiction texts we study.

Education Professor Katie Cunningham discussed diversity in Appendix B here on the blog a few weeks ago in her guest post, “What’s in your classroom library? Rethinking Common Core Recommended Texts.” Adding on to her recommendations, I’ve compiled a supplement to Appendix B that includes both contemporary literature and authors/characters of color, but also meets the criteria (complexity, quality, range) used by the authors of the Common Core. Download it here.

If you’re interested in ordering some or all of these titles to supplement your classroom library, please feel free to drop me an email at [email protected]!

from The Storyteller’s Candle / La velita de los cuentos by Lucia Gonzalez

What books would you add to Appendix B?  

Further Reading:

What’s in your classroom library? Rethinking Common Core Recommended Texts

What is Close Reading?