- language difficulty (which is what lexile aims to measure)
- how appropriate the topic is
My 5.5yo son is decoding words at about 4th grade level (based on an informal 'San Diego Quick Assessment'). But he's limited in his reading by:
- his life experience and existing knowledge, which both affect comprehension
- his willingness to read books that have few pictures (he doesn't like books that have 10 pages between pictures)
It's hard to find books that are age-appropriate (based on topic and maybe format) but also have challenging language (vocabulary, grammar).
It’s a hard problem though because categorization makes it easy to organize content and find what you’re looking for, but it can also feel like a competition, which is not always helpful.
The Humphrey the hamster series
The Zoey and Sassafras series
The Secret Explorers series
Alice in Wonderland
Some Beverly Cleary books
Many of the DK nonfiction books
This is just to provide a guideline/reference. The way I recommend seeing this list is - say your kid likes "The Penderwicks" then..."hey are few other books that are similar to The Penderwicks"
I was more lamenting the general difficulty of the problem. (And possibly just the lack of books that are suitable for kids who are advanced at reading, but have interests similar to other kids their age.)
I don't think this is a big deal, as IME kids don't find age inappropriate titles interesting enough to read. My wife is an elementary librarian and kids in grade 4 or less just don't like YA aimed at the 12+ crowd.
For example, the "Cherub" series by Robert Muchamore, which I greatly enjoyed as a kid, included crime, drug and alcohol use (even by kids), sex scenes, mentions of underage prostitution and human trafficking, and even a scene of an attempted rape on a minor. The much more popular "Hunger Games" series was a little bit less violent, but not by much. Nobody seemed to mind. Those books were clearly intended for teenagers, I'd say 12-16 year olds, and there were no disclaimers about what those books contained.
Even with TV, things aren't as obvious as they seem. Over here in Poland, very few parents care about age restrictions. Unlike English, we don't even have a word for "explicit content". Creating online accounts with fake dates of birth is pretty much normal. When I was in middle school, most people I knew watched porn with very few difficulties. Game stores don't have any obligations to restrict what kids can buy, it's not even clear if refusing a game sale based solely on the age of the buyer is legal[1]. When one game store refused to sell GTA5 to a kid, I heard about it on the news. When I compare people of my generation raised in Poland to our American peers, where explicit content is much more of a taboo, I see no noticeable effects of watching such content.
This has some disturbing censorship implications, how many real-life phenomena are filmmakers omitting to get just a little bit more viewers, just because of some well-intended laws that seem to have no actual positive effect on society?
[1] Polish https://bezprawnik.pl/sprzedaz-dziecku-gry-dla-doroslych/
I could also live with no more stories about saving society or the world and how it happens to have fallen about a teenager where they aren't sure what looks best to wear and can't decide between several people as a romantic partner among those who are helping them along their quest.
Let’s talk SEO. You need pages like this:
books-for-6-year-olds
books-for-7-year-olds
Etc
We have a site crontab.guru and you would not believe the traffic we get on our “every n minutes” pages. Long tail!
One more.. in your book pages I would change /series/ to /review/
btw - good fun series to pick up post Magic treehouse would be - Press Start, geronimo stilton/Thea stilton and Dogman to name a few.
Also, my kid is really enjoying the Dragon Masters series right now, seems good for the younger readers just getting interested in chapter books.
Suitability of books is a complex topic, but the site is a good start.
Typo: Animal Farm is by George Orwell (= Eric Blair), not by Jack London as the site says.
These books have great pencil drawings and text paragraph under each picture. They are not like Japanese cartoons which have almost no text. Their drawings are also not cartoonish.
Come to the US, I couldn’t find anything similar. There’s no new publication of these kind of books in China either.
Suggestion: I'm looking at the 10-14 list. When I click "Next Page", it retains the "book series" section on top and the actual next page I have to scroll halfway down the screen to see. I'm not expecting to have to skip over the book series section again to get to the next page of individual books. Difficult and confusing, at best.
Need to look at the other half. :-)
