Why Should Kids Read Grade Level Texts?

Many parents and teachers think lower-level books are better for kids to read. This is a misconception that lots of reading programs are trying to address. In recent years, many reading programs have opted to increase how much reading kids do during the school day. 

For example, many school districts reference the Open Up Resources organization that many school districts reference to make curricula decisions. Open Up Resources is a non-profit organization that focuses on increasing equity in education by making excellent, top-rated K-12 curricula freely available to districts. They review and recommend curricula authored by experts, designed for diverse classrooms, supported by professional learning, refined by teachers, and available to teachers in digital and print.  

Just so you know, this article may include affiliate links at no cost to you.  You can read my full disclosure at the bottom of the page.

Open Up Resources reviews curricula for kindergarten to high school. Their website contains English language arts curricula for kindergarten through eighth grade and mathematics curricula for middle and high school. Their website is a one-stop-shop for curricula and professional learning that’s vetted by experts. 

Changes in reading instruction

Many kids in school are learning to read using chapter books as ready as second grade. Researchers like Tim Shanahan has a dedicated presentation titled Teaching Struggling Readers with Grade Level Text—a This a presentation I highly recommend for teachers and parents to watch.

What is clear is that learning to read is a challenging task. To learn to read, a student must master foundational skills before they can comprehend grade-level text. When a child comprehends text, they can make sense of ideas expressed in text.

“Reading is the ability to make sense of ideas expressed in text- the ability to negotiate the linguistic and conceptual barriers or affordances of a text.”

Timothy Shanahan

Misconceptions

Timothy Shanahan has done extensive classroom observations throughout the United States as a reading expert. His observations have found four distinctive misconceptions he often sees in classroom observations. These misconceptions are patterns that I often hear as a district coordinator. 

To teach kid’s reading, teachers mistakenly:

1. Move students to easier text
2. Read aloud text to students 
3. Tell students what texts say 
4. Ignore the problem 

It is essential to realize that each misconception lowers learning expectations for students. As a result, student reading ability could be improved or capped. The above four misconceptions can be detrimental to reading development. When we choose not to teach students using text at their respective grade levels, we deny students the opportunity to thrive.  As a result, we hold kids back in reading development and contribute to their learning gap.  

Using Lexile Levels

Lexile levels can help ensure that we expose kids to grade-level A Lexile level is a score that provides educators a way to interpret reading level. Lexiles are one way to predict how hard a text might be. To predict text difficulty, developers determine how complicated vocabulary and sentence complexity are in a text.

The chart below shows the equivalent Lexile levels to grade level. For instance, you’ll see that a book with a Lexile level of 640L to 850L is considered at the 4th to 5th-grade level. According to the below Lexile level chart, a typical 4th and 5th grader can read that book with about 75-89% comprehension. 

This is when the importance of teaching and exposing kids to grade-level text comes into play. The chart below also shows the text-level difficulty recommended by the Common Core Standards. In the example above, kids in 4 and 5th grade should be taught using 740 to 1010 Lexile level. In other words, researchers recommend teaching kids to read books that go up to CCSS bands.  

Grade	Lexile Bands	Common Core Standards Bands
K-1	N/A	N/A
2-3	450L – 730L	420L – 820L
4-5	640L – 850L	740L – 1010L
6-8	860L – 1010L	925L – 1185L
9-10	960L – 1120L	1050L – 1335L
11-12	1070L – 1220L	1185L-1385L

Researchers continue investigating whether teaching kids at their reading level support reading development. What stands out in the research is that no particular study has found any benefits when teaching kids using their reading level, hence why recent curricula materials are using grade-level text, such as chapter books, to teach reading. 

Exposure to grade-level text

To avoid getting kids frustrated when they read the higher-level text, we should do several things to support them. First, effective reading instruction must incorporate scaffolding of reading and content learning to support grade-level text access. Scaffolding is a “special kind of help” given to kids during specific instruction (gibbons, 2015). 

Scaffolding can happen during math, science, social studies, or reading instruction. During reading, instruction scaffolds provide temporary language support to support grade-level text. Some recommended supports are pre-teaching vocabulary, direct teaching of reading skills such as making connections, and teaching syntax. There are many other ways to scaffold reading instruction; however, this post only shares some examples. 

How parents and teachers can help

There are many ways that parents and teachers can help to support appropriate reading instruction. First, parents can support this by exposing kids to grade-level text at home. Using Lexile levels is one way parents can compare their child’s reading level when selecting books for their kids. 

Teachers can help by ensuring that kids are not placed in lower reading groups during core English language arts instruction. We must learn to scaffold by taking intentional steps that give access to challenging texts. Such access can only come with the explicit instruction that can only happen in a structured classroom.  

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