Lexile levels

[Aroundtheworldin80moves]

Can anyone explain these please?
DD (yr4) started a new school this week. She struggles a bit with reading, but made great progress last year. She was on White level books.

Her lexile score is apparently less than 200, and she has brought home a toddler board book. She read it in under 5 minutes.
She reads chapter books at home.

Does this level sound a bit wrong?

Hi, are you in the UK? Lexile levels aren't used here very much.

IIRC a level of 200 means US grade 2. Might be wrong though, it has been a while!

The thing with lexile levels is that it addresses only the complexity of the text. Word length, number of words per sentence, grammatical structures. So a toddler book (meant to be read TO the toddler) might have a rather high lexile level. It has nothing to do with the content/age appropriateness. Some Harry Potter books on the other hand have a fairly low lexile level.

How was her lexile level assessed? Perhaps you could go to readtheory.org, let her do the initial assessment and then maybe 10 exercises to settle on a level, and compare the outcome?

In any case, I would definitely talk to the school. Given a 9yo a toddler board book is just not appropriate. If her reading ability really is very far below her age, there are plenty of 'low-high' books out there - books with low reading ability requirement but high interest age. (Just as there are high-low books, for precocious readers who e.g. can read anything at age 5 but really want to be reading something of interest to a 5 year old.)

Yes it's UK.
She has been screened for dyslexia, but it was inconclusive. Despite this, her last school put her on a whole word reading programme rather than phonics, which is when her reading improved. So on a strange test, I was thinking she might get a strange result.

Last night she read that book, then went to read a chapter book from her shelf. I know she probably isn't reading every word in her books, but she understands complex plots. Her comprehension level is a lot higher than her reading level.

Definitely odd. My Y3 and Y5 boys are around 600 and 800 respectively (inferred from books they get at school rather than a formal test, though am off to read the website suggested above)...

"her last school put her on a whole word reading programme rather than phonics, which is when her reading improved." Unfortunately this is likely the root of the problem. Whole word instruction often gives the illusion of reading without providing the child with a useful strategy to tackle unfamiliar words in text. It results in the child either misreading or skipping words.