Reading Levels for Indie Kids Books

How to get a Lexile score and how to use it.

LEXILE AND ACCELERATED READER LEVEL FOR YOUR CHILDREN’S BOOKS

When you write a children’s book, you must think of the audience. Kids are readers, but how well do they read? What vocabulary will they understand or not understand? Should you edit your story to include/exclude certain words?

Parents and teachers face this question daily as they try to figure out what is the best book for a certain kid at a certain time, or the best book to teach a concept, or the best book for a life event. The answers vary widely depending on many things but ultimately upon the child reader. Will they understand this book?

To help solve this problem, companies have devised a way to measure the reading level of a text. The most popular measures are the Lexile and the Accelerated Reader program with its AR. Let’s look at these in detail and decide when they right for your book.