Some observations

[owlectomy]

I would like to stop getting asked for grade n books as if that were a thing, as if all the children in the same grade could be provided with the same books and read them with equal ease.

I would like people to recognize that the best measure of what a child is capable of reading is not their grade, or their performance on a particular test, but what they want to read and what they're interested in reading and what they feel is within their abilities.

I would like kids to stop getting caught between a rock and a hard place where their parents and teachers decry the books they want to read as too babyish, but the books at the mythical "appropriate grade level" are actually too hard for them to read. If you're behind grade level in reading, you can't get over that by reading hard books. You can get over that by reading easy and fun books in great quantities.

You can only start where you are.

Parents seem fairly adept at tuning out the loud screech of a toddler in one's ear; I find it difficult to do reader's advisory under those conditions.

Comments

[deborah]

yeah, as a reviewer I hate having to assign books doing age range which is entirely based on fiction, hoping that my readers will understand that a book for a 10-year-old means "if this person is usually reading books that are usually for 10-year-olds, this is a good book for them no matter their age." But it's like women's clothing sizes: a single number to encompass waist and hips and inseam. People talk about high-lows as is the only two axes were vocabulary, and whether or not the book has drugs in it, as opposed to whether or not the book has an unreliable narrator, or nonlinear time flow, or an immoral narrator, or plays on pre-existing tropes, or any of the other literary forms which might make a book more or less suitable for a reader who has not fully developed cognitively and has limited experience.