WWTBAM Bored

As a nice follow-on to Lily's post, I saw this article about the most read books by kids, at every grade.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01331.html


You can open up the pdf to see the entire report. I might use it to come up with some ideas for summer reading for my kids.

(I had never heard of the "Biscuit" series of books.)


I thought that maybe there would be some difference in the reading habits of the "Top 10% of readers" from the overall list for K-2, with higher level books, but there did not seem to be much difference. Of course, I guess reading several Dr. Seuss books would give you as many or more points than reading a Magic Tree House or other chapter book.

I am wondering if the reading test program that the article references is the one that our son's former school used. We really liked it, and I know my wife highly recommmended it to our school principal. Currently, kids get recognition and awards for the number of minutes of self-reported reading. It leaves the question of whether they actually comprehended that reading unanswered. (We liked it enough that our kids have to answer questions about books when they finish them at home. Otherwise, they have to re-read it.)

I am not sure that I saw "The Phantom Tollbooth" on the list. In my mind, it should be required reading for kids.

I hate the Accelerated Reader program.

Emma's school has it, what I see is a bunch of kids reading to answer test questions, rather than for the love of literature and language. They race to read as many books as they can and I don't think that there is as much love of literature being developed.

I am sure that it helps test scores though and that's what drives most schools to adopt the program.

PlacentiaSoccerMom wrote:I hate the Accelerated Reader program.

Emma's school has it, what I see is a bunch of kids reading to answer test questions, rather than for the love of literature and language. They race to read as many books as they can and I don't think that there is as much love of literature being developed.

I am sure that it helps test scores though and that's what drives most schools to adopt the program.

Here is how I look at it.

Which would you rather have:

a kid who reads a book, and might only read to the depth needed to answer the AR test questions (or also might read for full comprehension, at that time or upon a re-reading);

or

a kid who never reads the book because there is no set reading program in place, other than library time and maybe scheduled "Drop Everything and Read" time?

Interestingly, our experience with the program was at a private school, where there is not the testing issue, while our public school does not use it. (Granted, although Nebraska is the only state IIRC to comply with NCLB in this way, our school district writes its own assessment tests that are given to the students, rather than standardized tests. So, the teachers always are teaching to the tests within the confines of the normal teaching plan.)

Isn't this skewed? the paper is by Renaissance Learning who owns Accelerated Reader so they only have data on schools that buy their product? The tests are costly so schools can only spend so much on them.

seems odd that the paper is giving so much press to this i/o using data from public libraries, school libraries on circulation, or publishers' data on sales.

lilyvonschtupp26 wrote:Isn't this skewed? the paper is by Renaissance Learning who owns Accelerated Reader so they only have data on schools that buy their product? The tests are costly so schools can only spend so much on them.

seems odd that the paper is giving so much press to this i/o using data from public libraries, school libraries on circulation, or publishers' data on sales.

Do you keep a running tabulation of which books are checked out by each student at each grade level? As far as I know, public libraries and publishers do not ask for the grade of each kid who checks out or buys a book. If there are other sources of information on what kids are reading, including whether kids are reading books at grade level, above, or below, then all the better for a full picture of the state of education.

It is skewed, but it states up front that it is merely the data from this one source. However, since they spent the time to compile everything, I am fine with whatever extra educational information that I can glean.

If I may ask, how much is it for a set of the CDs that the tests come on? I had imagined that it could not have been too expensive, as AR was being utilized by a small parochial school that had much more limited funds than the huge public school districts in Omaha.

More than anything, I initially read the article and then the report in order to see how many of the books have been read by my kids at the various grade levels.