What does my child’s reading level mean?

Schools and districts use different reading assessments to determine a student’s independent reading level.  Your child’s teacher might even use more than one. When using many of these assessments, the teacher will have your child read orally to determine the reading level in which your child reads independently.  This means it is the level in which your child can read alone while fully comprehending what they’re reading.

Depending on which reading assessment the teacher uses, the reading level could be a letter or number.

Lettered Levels:

Numbered Levels:

  • DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment)

  • ATOS (Accelerated Reader Level) This level corresponds with grade level and month. Example: 4.3 = fourth grade, third month

  • Lexile

  • Rigby

  • Reading Recovery

How is my child’s reading level determined?

Reading assessments usually monitor:

  1. Error/self-corrections

  2.  Fluency

  3. Comprehension

Error = Something your child reads wrong and never goes back to fix

Self-correction = Your child realizes what they said sounded funny and goes back to reread it correctly

Fluency = How many wpm (words per minute) your child reads - usually this is only assessed once your child reaches a certain reading level (around 2nd grade)

Comprehension = Does your child understand what they read? Most often students are asked to “Start from the beginning and tell us what happened in the story”. We’re looking to see, do they remember the beginning, middle, and end of the story they read? Do they remember the names of the characters? Do they remember some details? Teachers can prompt the child a bit, but it depends on the assessment being used.

As the reading levels get higher, some reading assessments require simple written summaries (and with nonfiction text) before they are allowed to be bumped to the next level. Feel free to ask your child’s teacher about the comprehension requirements of their reading assessments.

You haven’t mentioned the type of level my child’s teacher uses.

How can this website help me?

We have chosen to identify the reading levels of the books we have reviewed using the leveling we are most familiar with.  The leveling of the books has been done by Scholastic, and all levels were found using the Scholastic Book Wizard website, Literacy Leveler app, and AR (Accelerated Reader) Book Find.

If we do not provide you with the particular type of level your teacher gave you, you can use the following charts to see the corresponding level we do provide: