How To Quickly Determine the Reading Level of A Book
Many books list the reading level of the book right on their cover and even tell you what age children it is appropriate for. Other books have the information you are looking for near the barcode on the back cover. But, what do you do to determine the reading level of a book if the information is not listed?

Let me tell you some of the more common methods used to determine if a book is appropraite for a child. Many teachers use a method of leveling a book on the spot.

There are many methods that teachers have been using in their own classroom to determine if a book is an appropriate book for that certain child. Leveling a book on the spot is usually done to see if it fits a certain child. The "five finger rule" is an easy way to level a book for an individual child. Open the book up to a random page and have the child start reading. Every time the child makes a mistake, hold up one finger. When the child makes five mistakes before getting to the end of the page, this book is above their reading level. A mistake can be not knowing a word or even leaving the word out.

The reason the methods like the "5 finger rule" have been around and continue to be used is because they apply book leveling to the individual child, which only makes sense. All the book levels in the world won't do you any good if that child can't pick up the book and read it.

Another method is to go through about 5 pages of the book and see if you can find 20 vocabulary words that a child does not know. If you can find 20 or more words, this book is over their head and should not be read at this time.

There's millions of different ways to check, at a glance, if a child should read a certain book. The examples I have given so far mainly gravitate around fluency. But comprehension should not be ignored, because, ultimately, it is what matters most.

Many people have the child read to them out of the book and check for fluency when reading. The problem with this method is that they may not comprehend the book at all. Many students are excellent word callers but do not comprehend what they are reading and others read very slow but comprehend everything. Be careful using this as a quick way to determine the reading level of a book.

Having a child read to you for fluency and then doing a comprehension check will only work if you have a knowledge of the book and that can be hard when you have many students interested in many different topics.

You can use the Internet to find reading levels of books too. The Teacher Book Wizard by Scholastic is a good source. It lists the levels of hundreds of books.

The Fry Readability Formula uses a graph and can be found at Wikipedia. It is a good way to also find a level of a book and should be checked out, but if you want to find a quick way to determine the reading level of a book and you do not have time to use the Internet, I suggest you use the "Five Finger Method"

I hope this was helpful and that you can get some good out of it. Some other resources are listed below.