When a teenager has a Green Eggs and Ham reading level, what’s a teacher to do? “High-interest, low readability” books used to deal with adult themes in very simple vocabulary and short sentences, writes Christina A. Samuels on Education Week. The second-grade level was the starting point.
Now Saddleback Educational Publishing’s Teen Emergent Reader Library offers books that start at a pre-kindergarten reading level.
What is a pre-k reading level? Well, every page has “full-color, riveting photographs.”
The publisher claims “this series offers middle and high school teachers the solution for differentiating instruction while still teaching grade-level content and meeting Common Core standards.”
For example, they can read a book on homelessness — or look at the full-color photos — and discuss the issue. But how does that meet Common Core standards, which call for students to read — and read closely — “complex literary and informational texts?”
“Picking books that appeal to an older audience and use lower-level vocabulary is a really sound concept for teen readers,” said Barbara Stripling, the president of the American Library Association. “They don’t want to be reading about dogs and cats, they want to be reading about Beyoncé.”
Sophisticated knowledge does not always have to come with long words and complex sentence structure, teachers say.
. . . For example, Soldier’s Heart, a book by Gary Paulsen about the devastating effects of the Civil War on a young Union soldier, is appropriate for middle school students but uses language at a 2nd grade level of mastery, (Professor Teri) Lesesne said. Night, Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical account of the horrors of a Nazi death camp, is written at a 5th grade level, she said.
If students have reached their teens without being able to read . . . Isn’t this make-believe?
Of 183 University of North Carolina basketball and football players a tutor researched since 2005, 8 to 10 percent read below the third-grade level, writes New York Times columnist Joe Nocera. Sixty percent read between the fourth- and eighth-grade levels, says Mary Willingham, a reading specialist turned whistle-blower.
Many were eligible for college sports because their high school grades were good enough to outweigh very low SAT scores.