Reject this resource
I was fascinated by a headline in my Facebook feed last week. TEA (the Texas Education Agency) announced a great new resource for summer reading. I clicked on the link, and read about the Find a Book initiative. According to the press release (http://tea.texas.gov/About_TEA/News_and_Multimedia/Press_Releases/2015/TEA_shares_free_summer_reading_resource/), it is a way to help parents select books based on their children's interest and reading level. Alarm bells began to go off in my head. Sure enough, here is a lovely gift from Metametrics, aka Lexile.com. This resource comes complete with some screens about why Lexiles are the way to select a book for your children.
We need to get the word out PRONTO that this is not a resource. This is a program that will spit out book recommendations based on syllables, sentences, semantics, and syntax. It reduces books and children to numbers and formulae.
If parents need a resource, I would point them in the direction of all the various and sundry lists out there already. Better yet, head to your nearest book store and offer to put together some recommendations for kids in your school. You know more about them than Metametrics (and TEA) does.
I spent this morning opening boxes and envelopes and piling books on my desk. I sorted, shelved, and stacked. And then I started reading. How did I prioritize? Not by Lexiles, I assure you. I read the forthcoming Loren Long first.
There is not yet a Lexile for the book but the rest of his books are pretty much AD820L. The AD copde means these are generally because an ADULT reads the book to the child. News to me since LITTLE TREE would be a book most kids could read once they have "cracked the code." I moved down the stack of picture books I read: not ONE of them was in the data base. These are all published books, but no Lexile in sight. So, I guess we can forget about new books. Maybe we just need to look at books from last year. I was able to locate some of the Caldecott titles such as Beekle (AD480) but not all of them (Nana in the Big City was missing). This One Summer has a GN 300L measurement with a note that Lexiles do not take into account the effect of illustrations (they call them pictures) on comprehension. Well, that is certainly true, but why the measurement? It is based solely on the text. What 14-17 year old would be permitted to read a book with a 300L?
Okay, time to climb down from the soap box and do the one thing guaranteed to reduce my blood pressure: read. Read and revel in the wonder of books.
We need to get the word out PRONTO that this is not a resource. This is a program that will spit out book recommendations based on syllables, sentences, semantics, and syntax. It reduces books and children to numbers and formulae.
If parents need a resource, I would point them in the direction of all the various and sundry lists out there already. Better yet, head to your nearest book store and offer to put together some recommendations for kids in your school. You know more about them than Metametrics (and TEA) does.
I spent this morning opening boxes and envelopes and piling books on my desk. I sorted, shelved, and stacked. And then I started reading. How did I prioritize? Not by Lexiles, I assure you. I read the forthcoming Loren Long first.
There is not yet a Lexile for the book but the rest of his books are pretty much AD820L. The AD copde means these are generally because an ADULT reads the book to the child. News to me since LITTLE TREE would be a book most kids could read once they have "cracked the code." I moved down the stack of picture books I read: not ONE of them was in the data base. These are all published books, but no Lexile in sight. So, I guess we can forget about new books. Maybe we just need to look at books from last year. I was able to locate some of the Caldecott titles such as Beekle (AD480) but not all of them (Nana in the Big City was missing). This One Summer has a GN 300L measurement with a note that Lexiles do not take into account the effect of illustrations (they call them pictures) on comprehension. Well, that is certainly true, but why the measurement? It is based solely on the text. What 14-17 year old would be permitted to read a book with a 300L?
Okay, time to climb down from the soap box and do the one thing guaranteed to reduce my blood pressure: read. Read and revel in the wonder of books.