[awb]

The same goes for the inverse. It can be discouraging for kids behind in reading to be assigned content based on their age (or grade) only for it to be far too challenging.

It’s a hard problem though because categorization makes it easy to organize content and find what you’re looking for, but it can also feel like a competition, which is not always helpful.

[cpfohl]

I wonder if the solution is _not_ naming the categories...simply ordering them by difficulty...

[realcul]

Yes, that is definitely a good way to represent. Instead of age group based recommendation...we simply call it Phase 3, Phase 4 etc...

[bcrosby95]

The elementary school our kid goes to seems to use this rating system: https://www.readinga-z.com/books/leveled-books/

Each grade level has 4 "levels". But each kid is on their own track. And while those books have assigned grades, the teacher assigns a pool of books for each kid based upon their actual reading level. And each week, the kids are supposed to pick 4 books from their pool to take home and read.

My daughter is in 1st grade and every week picks 4 "R/S" books (3rd grade). She has a friend that still picks books in the "D/E" category (late kindergarten/early 1st grade).

[OJFord]

That's similar to what I recall from school myself, 20+ years ago. Iirc ours was based on colours, which was a nice dual because as you got more advanced the colour names themselves progressed from easy primary colours to secondary, tertiary - nicher vocabulary for the colour names before you'd even opened the book.

[realcul]

Thanks for sharing it. Will definitely check it out.

[bwb]

Is that using Lexile to do that?

[bcrosby95]

Looking up Lexile, it seems to be different from it, although you can probably cross correlate books to some extent.

[cpfohl]

Love how you guys thought it out!