Good Fit Books, Good Fit Books, Good Fit Books!!!!
(Your kids are STARTING to get the idea...)
How to tell if a book is a good fit book for your child:
1) Select a book your child seems to find interesting, based on its text features (cover, title, author, back cover, etc.)
2) Open the book to a random page - somewhere in the middle.
3) Have your child read aloud a paragraph, or possibly the whole page.
If you child misreads 8-10 words, or cannot read 8-10 words (besides names) without your help, STOP - this is not a good fit book yet!
4) If your child can easily or somewhat easily read the page aloud in an appropriate amount of time (it should not take 5 minutes to read a page!!), ask them to define what seems to be a "hard" word on the page. See if they can use the sentence or word context to define it.
AND/OR
5) Ask your child to tell you what is happening/what they think is happening based on what they just read. Obviously they may not know much about the characters, but they should be able to come up with a bit of a plot line - that would most-likely match your own comprehension or assumption about the story. ("It sounds like the boy is looking for something", or "it sounds like the girl is angry at her," or "it sounds like the machine is able to move about the room" etc.)
If they cannot do steps 4 or 5 without a lot of support from you, then STOP - this is not a good fit book yet!
In all situations, the key word is YET. Our goal as parents and educators should be to get the kids reading good fit books, which will improve their vocabulary and reading comprehension strategies, so they can move from "easier" books to "harder" books.
A GOOD FIT book is a book that engages your child, while enriching their vocabulary and challenging their reading skills just a bit. Your child should be able to finish the book within two weeks, if not a shorter period of time!
Your child should be able to:
make connections (with other books, with their own lives, with things in our world)
make predictions about characters and plot
ask questions (besides "what is going on" or "what are they talking about??"
share feelings like "I hated when she ____ because".... or "I can't believe he______ because" NOT "this book is stupid" or "I hate this book"
give a summary WITH DETAILS of what is happening in the story, not just something like "so there's two boys and they're brothers and they went here, and then there, and then to this other place..."
My desire is for your kids to be fighting you on "lights out" time, and for you to come into their rooms at night and find them reading books under the blankets with flashlights, NOT for you to be pulling teeth and fighting tooth and nail for them to sit still and read for 15 to 20 to 30 minutes a night.
Let me know how else I can help you make this a reality.