Ages 5 to 7: kindergarten to 1st grade reading
A first book to read yourself, built from sounds you know.
What a book at this level is
Every draft is measured against these numbers before anybody sees it. A book that falls outside them is rewritten, and if it still can’t be brought inside them, we don’t send it.
- Length
- 500 to 1500 words, aiming at 900
- Pages
- 12 to 20, with 20 to 90 words on each
- Longest sentence
- 12 words
- Reading grade
- Flesch-Kincaid 0.5 to 2.5
- TaleTykes level
- 200 to 500, on a scale of our own
- Typically read in
- Kindergarten to 1st grade
- Pictures
- 6 to 12
- Chapters
- None. It is one story, read in a sitting.
- How much is people talking
- Between 20 and 60 percent
- Built from sounds they know
- Yes, against the phonics phase this reader has reached
- Danger in the story
- Mild, and always resolved inside the book.
What the story is like
How it is put together
Meet someone and what they want, then the problem. Three tries fail, each worse than the last, and the fourth works because the hero uses something from the first pages. The idea is theirs, never a grown-up's. A closing turn, and the refrain one last time.
What is worth worrying about
Social: a friendship, whether something was fair, being left out.
What is funny at this age
Things going wrong in front of you. A joke that comes back. We never use sarcasm. A child who can’t hear it yet takes it literally, and in a story that usually comes across as unkind.
The shapes a story takes
linear, repetition
Verse is allowed.
The sounds behind a book at this level
A book for this age is written against a phonics phase. When a book is held strictly to a child's phonics phase, its writing is checked against a target of at least 95% of words using only the letter sounds taught so far and no page more than 10% outside them, not counting character names, the heart words already taught and a few words the story is about, and a draft that misses is written again. Each phase below publishes the letters it adds and every everyday word a child who has been taught them can sound out.
- Kindergarten phonics: s, a, t, p, i, n (phase 1)
- Kindergarten phonics: m, d, g, o, c, k (phase 2)
- Kindergarten phonics: short e, u, ck, r
- Kindergarten phonics: double ff, ll, ss
- Kindergarten phonics: j, v, w, x (phase 5)
- Kindergarten phonics: y, z, zz, qu (phase 6)
- Kindergarten phonics: digraphs ch, sh, th, ng
- 1st grade phonics: vowel teams, r-controlled
- 1st grade phonics: silent e, more vowel teams
- 2nd grade phonics: augh, ough, eigh (phase 10)
- 2nd to 3rd grade phonics: -tion, -sion, -ture
The levels either side
Children move between these levels at very different speeds, and how fast they go doesn’t matter much. We move a reader on when the books they actually read show they are ready, whatever their birthday says.