How do you work out reading age?

[chicaguapa]

Only because I am looking at books on The Book People for DD (6) and I'm not sure what age range to go for. She's reading confidently and I don't think she has trouble with the words. She's on Level 7 of ORT at school but I know that's very easy for her. But she reads the Usborne Young Readers & Puzzle Adventures and Dr Seuss, that kind of thing at home. Any ideas? I know it's not just about vocabulary but story structure etc.

A lot of the books are not really very accurate regarding 'age' anyway - eg some say age 5 - 8

I found it best to either look on Amazon for one of those 'look inside' pages to see the size of text, number / size of pictures etc, r go to a bookshop to assess whetehr i thought the dc's could manage the book.

My dc's love the non fiction collections on Book People and schoolslink - Dorling kindersley Eye wonder and Kingfisher young knowledge

Dd also likes magic kitten, Mily Molly Mandy, the seriously silly story colelction, and the sprinters collection are good too. Now she is reading Jeremy Strong, the animal ark series and the Roald Dahl set

If you want to work out reading age you could try the attached link which allows you to test your child. I not sure how accurate it is but it is interesting.Link

Burt reading test

I wouldn't mind betting you could do those two reading age tests on your child and come out with two different reading ages. Actually I might try that later.
DD3 is at the same sort of level as your daughter but she is still daunted by chapter books - she can read the words but finds the prospect of pages of text without pictures overwhelming and it just turns her off. So I try to go for books with colour pictures and a couple of paragraphs of text on each page - she can read any word she comes across but I don't want her to see it as a 'task' and at the moment pictures are still a big part of her enjoyment of a book.
So for Christmas I have got her (so far )
The Lauren Child Pippi Longstocking (Book Peole have it)
The new Alfie book (Alfie and the Big Boys)
A lovely book of fairy tales by Berlie Doherty
A pop-up Cinderella by Phillida Gill that I think was on offer at Book People
A few of those Yellow Banana books.
Personally I think there is too much rush to move children on from picture books when they can read 'properly'. There is huge enjoyment to be got for a six or seven year old or even an older child from a well-written picture book.
Look at Orchard books for some great ones and also Barefoot Books.
Bit of a hobbyhorse of mine however so will stop banging on.

Yes, agree with RosaTransylvania about the picture books. DS2 (6 and a bit and a very fluent reader) still loves picture books and comics and every morning his room is strewn with them. He is very keen on annuals and 'storybooks' from eg Dr Who or Star Wars, as well as many excellent non-fiction books, which are great at the sort of stage your DD seems to be at. The Usborne ones are excellent as they break up text with pictures, even when the vocabulary can be challenging.

The online reading tests might not be very useful, TBH. I did the Burt one on DS2 when he was 5 and he came out with a very high 'age', but that was in no way indicative of the sort of books he enjoyed.

ask her teacher

Different reading tests assess different skills. For instance there's a Herts reading test that assesses comprehension, and a Schonell one that does word recognition. (Both pretty old now, mind you. One refers to coal-fired central heating as the norm!). Dig about to find out what any score actually means. And if you're not impressed with the 'scheme' books that come home in the book bag, just supplement them with some frmm home or the library. And if they're only interested in ones that are too hard for them to read alone, share the slog with them - a paragraph each or whatever.

Thanks for all the interesting and useful info. DD enjoys reading DS's (3) books and I'm just keen to promote reading as an enjoyable activity. But I know she also really enjoys the fuller stories but is also daunted by the big chapter books with no picures so I didn't want to get books that will just sit on her bookshelf for the next year.

I did the C4 test posted above and came up with 8.6 which I would probably agree with. The teacher is sending her home with stage7 ORT even though DD took an Usborne Young Readers book to school and read the whole class a story about Animal Legends from it! She's done the 'reading with expression', 'different character voices', 'looking for information in a book' so I suppose it's hard to know where the teacher can go from there anyway.