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Old 09-26-2012, 04:47 PM
 
Location: The analog world
17,077 posts, read 13,311,105 times
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Um, no. Plus, believe it or not, his books do not generally meet the AR level my son has been assigned. Like many contemporary adult fiction writers, most of his books are written at a sixth-grade level or lower.
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Old 09-26-2012, 05:13 PM
 
1,034 posts, read 1,794,699 times
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Jules Verne? Robert Louis Stevenson?
There's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, or G.K.Chesterton's Father Brown mystery stories.
Writers from the late 19th and early decades of the 20th c. might fit the assigned reading level.


My son hated to read, said there were faster ways to get information than reading a book and movies were more entertaining than books. He thought the Jules Verne books I talked him into reading were good, but not enough to turn him onto reading for pleasure.
He despised all but one of the books that were assigned reading throughout school. He liked William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
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Old 09-26-2012, 07:36 PM
 
1,428 posts, read 3,155,228 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by randomparent View Post
Finding appropriately challenging reading material for kids can be a struggle. Right now, I am sitting at the library trying to find fiction for my fifth grader, whose AR goal is a 7.2. It's not easy to find something at that level that will appeal to a middle-grader beyond Harry Potter and The Hobbit. There's Wind in the Willows, but try selling that to a 10-year-old boy! And he's not quite ready for Dickens or Shakespeare, so I'm losing my mind trying to find something relevant and engaging without turning him off to fiction completely.
My suggestion?

1. Jack London, The Call of the Wild
2. Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
3. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
4. Jack London, White Fang
5. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
6. Gary Paulsen, Hatchet
7. Scott O'Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
8. Rosemary Sutcliffe, Black Ships Before Troy

Hope that gives you a place to start.
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Old 09-26-2012, 08:05 PM
 
Location: Georgia, USA
37,025 posts, read 41,072,493 times
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What happened to turning the kid loose in the stacks and letting him choose his own books?
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Old 09-27-2012, 05:04 AM
 
Location: North of Canada, but not the Arctic
21,065 posts, read 19,559,394 times
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I bet if they tested kids on their television watching skills, we would find ourselves in the company of child prodigies.
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Old 09-27-2012, 06:58 AM
 
17,171 posts, read 16,318,420 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by randomparent View Post
Finding appropriately challenging reading material for kids can be a struggle. Right now, I am sitting at the library trying to find fiction for my fifth grader, whose AR goal is a 7.2. It's not easy to find something at that level that will appeal to a middle-grader beyond Harry Potter and The Hobbit. There's Wind in the Willows, but try selling that to a 10-year-old boy! And he's not quite ready for Dickens or Shakespeare, so I'm losing my mind trying to find something relevant and engaging without turning him off to fiction completely.
You could try searching a web site like scholastic book wizard. Enter the genre and reading level that you're looking for and lots will pop up.

I tend to go with subjects that my kids are into rather than focusing on a particular reading level. The goal is to make the classics less intimidating to them. Few kids would choose to read a book like Where the Red Fern Grows (a big favorite in our house) or The Incredible Journey unless a parent/teacher suggested it to them. Watership Down, books by H.G. Wells might also be good ones to try.

You can also do a shared reading of a book like The Christmas Carol. This story is usually well above a 5th grader's reading level, but it's a great story all the same. And you can follow up by watching it performed on stage or simply watching a t.v. presentation. Plus, once they've read Dickens, other books tend to seem quite easy by comparison .
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Old 09-27-2012, 07:00 AM
 
Location: Shawnee-on-Delaware, PA
7,996 posts, read 7,348,224 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Charles Wallace View Post
My suggestion?

1. Jack London, The Call of the Wild
2. Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
3. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
4. Jack London, White Fang
5. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
6. Gary Paulsen, Hatchet
7. Scott O'Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
8. Rosemary Sutcliffe, Black Ships Before Troy

Hope that gives you a place to start.
For some relatively new stuff you can also try:
London Calling, or anything by Edward Bloor.
Capt. Hook: The Adventures of a Notorious Youth by J.V. Hart (illustrated by Brett Helquist) featuring the Peter Pan character as a youth.

And my opinion is stay away from the Lemony Snicket series. It's fun, clever, and naughty at first but the joke wears thin and by the 8th or 9th book you notice the story still hasn't progressed, and it never does, through 13 grueling and pointless books.
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Old 09-27-2012, 07:28 AM
 
Location: St Louis, MO
4,677 posts, read 5,750,752 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ellar View Post
What appears to be inaccurate is the statement that you cannot compare test scores across years. It is actually designed so you can make comparisons from year to year. However, I agree with you that it would be difficult to make comparisons over a longer period of time because of testing changes.
You can compare individual scores from year to year. You cannot compare group aggregate scores. Because of the normalization of scores each year, all the group average score reflects is how many students took the test. The more students who take the test, the lower the average score.
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Old 09-27-2012, 07:44 AM
 
Location: St Louis, MO
4,677 posts, read 5,750,752 times
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Here's my best attempt at explaining how the SAT is scored....
SAT assumes that ability level of students does not change from year to year. Remember that. That assumption alone says a lot about these year to year comparisons.

Each year, each test administration, the test changes. It has to, otherwise people would cheat. That means that each test is easier or harder than all previous tests given. If the same person took multiple tests, they would get different raw scores.

So, the tests are normalized. The idea is to try to make sure that the same student taking two different tests at two different difficulty levels would get the same score. To do this, SAT retains some questions from test to test. The performance on these questions is used to adjust the scoring scale between the two tests so that the same person would score the same on both tests. If you have the exact same students taking both tests, you will have the exact same scaled score regardless of how they actually performed on the test. Each individual should have the same score on both tests, even though their raw scores could differ greatly.

That is what SAT means when it says the ability level of the students you take the test with will not affect your scores; because SAT assumes that any variance in scores is due to the difficulty level of the test not ability level of the students.

Now, if you have the same sample of students testing from year to year, then you end up with the exact same scores. If their ability levels are normally distributed and randomly selected from all students, then the average score will not change. This is not what happens. In previous years, the upper standard deviations of students were heavily oversampled. Why? Because the test is self-selecting. Only students considering college with the financial means to take the test took it. The population was assumed to be a random sample from all students, but it was heavily right skewed. As a result, average test scores are higher.

Today, more students take the test. More students are college bound. More students have to take the test to qualify for athletic scholarships, non-school programs that use the SAT, and even K-8 and competitive high school admissions (though the last group is filtered out in scaling). Widely used fee waivers make the decision to take the test easier for a greater number of marginal students. And those additional students came from the middle and lower standard deviations. The normal distribution has filled in and the right skew is disappearing. If you took the exact same sample of students from previous years out of this year, you would actually have a higher average (due to recentering), and indeed the top students have much much higher scores. When I took the test, a 1500 was considering amazing and could get you into any school. Now a 2250 (new 2400 scale) is just average for a top student and will only get you consideration from some of the top schools. But because the middle and low students now make up a much higher percentage of the group testing, the average score actually drops even though the same groupings of students are performing higher.

Hence my statement, the more students who take the test, the lower the average score.
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Old 09-27-2012, 07:51 AM
 
3,670 posts, read 7,148,328 times
Reputation: 4269
probably just bc more people are taking the test
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