YLG Conference

I went to a conference today for librarians and the focus was on phonics and how children learn to read. The speaker emphasized the need for children to understand what they are reading (not just what individual words mean but what the whole story is about) and enjoy reading. I think what we do as librarians is very important to this goal because by reading to children from a young age and modeling reading aloud for parents we are enabling children to understand and enjoy stories. So, once they start reading on their own maybe that part can come more naturally.

May I say this is why I am not the biggest fan of things like Lexile, because as far as I can tell, the difficulty of the books is calculated only based on how hard the text is to decode. The maturity level of the story and how much it might appeal to a certain age group is not considered at all.

The speaker said that there is no such thing as a book that is too easy, but there are books that are too difficult. Now I have been frustrated when I have seen grade school children flying through board books trying to "cheat" at summer reading. But for a child who is genuinely interested in a book that could be considered below his reading level, if he is going to get something out of it, yeah, what's the harm?