As any parent, teacher or homeschooler knows, you can't tell a book's level by its cover just like you can't determine a child's reading level by the grade that he or she is in.Katie & Kimble: A Ghost Story (Bk 1) = 280L;
Katie & Kimble: The Magic Wish (Bk 2) = 290L
The official Lexile® measures for the Katie & Kimble books are now available.
Author Linda Thieman discusses providing Lexile® measures for parents and teachers at Reader Views Kids:
Tyler Tichelaar: Linda, what made you decide to write the books to meet the educational requirements for third graders? I’ve interviewed many children’s authors, and you’re the first to mention this—I’m impressed and it makes me think you were smart about identifying your target audience and also working your books into school programs—many children’s authors don’t have educational backgrounds and so perhaps they don’t think to test the books this way. What advice would you give to children’s authors in writing to their target audience of a specific age group of children?
Linda Thieman: Well, once the story evolved into something complex enough that I realized I was going to have to use a chapter book format, I took some good advice and went to a bookstore to look at the different levels of chapter books. A loose system was being used in which a book would be called, for instance, Reading Level 3 (RL3) or Reading Level 4 (RL4), and there was quite a big difference between the two in terms of number of words, number of chapters, chapter length, sentence length and structure, vocabulary, and the complexity of the content. So, I decided that Reading Level 3 would work for me, which roughly corresponds to third grade. I purchased a couple of books, including “The Boxcar Children,” and based the “Katie & Kimble” books on those examples. This system was sort of hit and miss, but amazingly, the Lexile® measures for the first two “Katie & Kimble” books are 280L and 290L, and “The Boxcar Children” measured at 300L. Now, however, once you do all that research and decide which reading level you wish to target, Lexile® provides writers with a free, pre-publication measure so that you know if you’re at the right level or not.
The Lexile Framework® for Reading is a scientific approach to measuring reading ability and the difficulty of reading materials. The Lexile Framework includes a Lexile® measure and the Lexile scale. A Lexile measure represents both the difficulty of a text, such as a book or article, and an individual’s reading ability. Lexiles are expressed as numeric measures followed by an “L” (e.g., 850L), and are placed on the Lexile scale. The Lexile scale is a developmental scale for measuring reader ability and text difficulty, ranging from below 200L for beginning readers and beginning-reader materials to above 1700L for advanced readers and materials.
Manage your students’ reading comprehension
Lexile measures allow you to manage comprehension. Matching a reader’s Lexile measure with a text with the same Lexile measure leads to an expected 75-percent comprehension rate—not too difficult to be frustrating, but difficult enough to be challenging and to encourage reading progress. You can further adjust anticipated comprehension simply by choosing more or less difficult texts within a student’s Lexile range, which spans 50L above and 100L below his or her Lexile measure.
Download Lexile Measures in the Classroom here.
Katie & Kimble: A Ghost Story (Bk 1) = 280L
Katie & Kimble: The Magic Wish (Bk 2) = 290L
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Katie & Kimble: A Ghost Story (Book 1 in the series) and Katie & Kimble: The Magic Wish (Book 2 in the series) are available here:
Paperback version: $5.95
Click here to order Katie & Kimble: A Ghost Story!
Click here to order Katie & Kimble: The Magic Wish (Book 2)!
Instant download version: $2.48
Click here to order the instant download editions.
[Reading Level 3, 280L, for ages 7-10]
Nine-year-old Katie Russell and her family look normal. But the Russells don't know they are living with Kimble, the ghost of a ten-year-old girl. That is, until Katie discovers Kimble and the two of them set off on a quest to find out what happened to Kimble's mother.
Nine-year-old Katie Russell and her family look normal. But the Russells don't know they are living with Kimble, the ghost of a ten-year-old girl. That is, until Katie discovers Kimble and the two of them set off on a quest to find out what happened to Kimble's mother.
