I obsess over reading levels. Just a little bit.
It’s hard to not obsess when you decide that English comes second to Chinese. While I know, logically, that if my kids have really high level Chinese, it will take them probably at most 1 to 2 years to catch up to English. I know, logically, they get good English input from their father, and that is super important to reading and writing. But I still worry.
So here’s how I assuage my worry, by looking up English reading levels. This way I can say, my kid is 1 grade behind or my kid is at grade level in English! Yay! At the same time, I know there is more to reading that cannot be seen by a simple letter or number.
But I cannot escape from measurements against a standard.
Overview of Reading Levels
Added Oct 2018
Over the last 3 years, I’ve used 3 different English levels, and I’ve found each one suited my need at different stages of Thumper‘s reading.
- Guided Reading Level
- AR
- Lexile
GRL levels from A-Z, AR gives you a grade level, and Lexile gives you a number between 0-1300. I like GRL because, if you look at the Leveled Text Chart below, you’ll see that during Kindergerten and 1st grade there are a lot of “sub levels” in GRL and DRA. So using GRL really helps you to go methodically up levels within K-1, basically when you’re first starting to learn how to read.
Once past this level, we used AR because the leveling slows down and using AR is good enough to find books within a certain grade level to read. So AR levels are good for 2nd-4th, maybe even 5th.
Then I ran into a problem. AR levels actually have 3 sub indicators, Interest Level (IL), Book Level (BL), and AR Points. So going by BL has a problem because TONS of books stop at 5th and 6th grade level, but their IL is actually for college and adults. For example, the Da Vinci code has a BL level of 6.4 but a IL level of 9th-12th grade.
So now I search for books via AR and Lexile. Lexile allows me to continue my habit of searching for books with ever more difficult vocabulary. I find Lexile to be a teeny bit more accurate in that regard. For example, the Hobbit has an AR level of 6.6, with interest level of upper grades, whereas Lexile has it at 1000L, which is at 7.4 grade. And I find that to be more accurate, just looking at grade level numbers, as I’ve given Thumper other 6th grade books and yet she finds the Hobbit hard.
I included a lot of various charts below. For me, I found the Guided Reading Level Converted to Grade Level Chart useful when Thumper first learned to read. Because the ranges for each grade are kind of useless otherwise. For Lexile, I found the Lexile Conversion Chart super useful. I reference it all the time to figure out its mapping to grade level. I’ve included a screen shot of it at the bottom of this post.
You can look up Lexile from their website and AR levels from here.
Details
Thumper has been going through Magic Treehouse Kindle Edition
Apparently the different reading level numbers and letters don’t quite match to each other. Take Magic Treehouse.
According to this chart, DRA puts you at grade 2. But Lexile puts you at grade 1. Confusing.
Conversion of GRA, Lexile, DRA to Grade Level Chart
Whole websites are devoted to charts mapping different reading levels. I finally came across this post. I like it a lot because it came from a school district gives you a range in a graph format, and shows you what middle of the curve is for each grade level. This is using the Guided Reading Level going from A-Z.
So taking Magic Treehouse again. A level of M takes you to the end of Grade 2. Looking at all the websites, I realized it’s best to just find one reading to grade level mapping, be it Lexile, DRA, Guided Reading, AR, etc, and stick to that. Saves you all the headache with each one pointing to a different grade level.
Guided Reading Level Converted to Grade Level Chart
When I look at these Reading Levels, I realized, because all I hear from friends are stories of accelerated English readers, and I don’t know what generally happens in public school when it comes to teaching English, I can get a very skewed view of just how high of a level kids are reading in first and second grade.
When you look at the charts and the types of books that maps to these charts, it’s clear that kids really spend those first three grades learning to read. They don’t all learn to read by the end of first grade and is ready to read Harry Potter by second. They’re still working on compound words in level G and H. First grade gives you the basics and second grade you still work on the more advanced phonics concepts. Here’s the full PDF here.
GRA Reading Levels to Phonics Concept Chart
Most of this info comes from What the Teacher Wants blog.
Lastly, here’s yet another chart published a school which gives you a good sense of whether or not your child is at grade level, using Lexile numbers. For Magic Treehouse’s Lexile score of 240, this means it’s at a Strategic 2nd grade level. With Benchmark, Strategic, Intensive defined as:
- Intensive – Students below the cut point for risk are identified as “Well Below Benchmark” and are unlikely (approximately 10-20%) to achieve subsequent goals without receiving additional, targeted instructional (“Intensive”) support.
- Strategic – Students between the goal and cut point for risk will likely need “Strategic” support, and their future performance is harder to predict.
- Benchmark – Students at or above the benchmark goal will most likely (approximately 80-90%) achieve later important reading outcomes with regular classroom instruction.
Lexile Range per Grade Level Chart
See? So different! One puts you at the end of 2nd grade level and the other as below benchmark. Oh well, good enough for now.
Lastly, I find that Lexile gives you a better idea of whether or not the book is at the right level for Thumper than the GRL letters because Lexile takes into comprehension and ease of language used in the book. In addition, it also really really helps to have the grade level mappings broken up into progress through the school year. Like this jpg here:
Lexile, GRA Grade Level Progression Chart
