How to Determine the Readability of Any Text

I'm sure you've seen it before. A child just laboring away trying to work through a passage. Maybe they just circle answers and move on. Or maybe they completely shut down and quit. It may mean the text is just too hard. Now I know that students reading below level will have to work through text on grade level, especially for tests. But that text needs to be within reason (no more than 2 grade levels above their current grade).

So, maybe I'm way behind on this, but I just learned that you can actually check the readability of any document on Microsoft Word! That was so awesome to me because now I feel like I can look at a passage online and decide if it's appropriate for my students or not. Or if I ever decided down the road to create my own passages (not any time soon with a baby in the house), I can make sure it's appropriate. I figured surely some of you were also in the dark on this, so I decided to share a quick tutorial.

First, you have to make sure your program is already set up to find the readability of a passage. Mine was not. It's very easy, and you should only have to do it once.

Once you've done that, you can just put in any passage and test it out! It only takes a few seconds to do. I will say that I tried a list of sentences, but it didn't really work for that. This is geared toward paragraphs of information.

If you don't have Word or just want something easier, I also found a free website that runs text through FIVE different readability formulas and gives an average score: Readability-Score.com
You can either copy and paste text OR you can check a website's readability. I circled that data it gives.

I'm so excited to have these tools available and can't wait to be able to use them when choosing text to use with my students! It also will be helpful when sending home letters to parents so I will avoid being too wordy. Apparently I don't have much trouble with that since my blog came out as a fourth grade reading level. I guess I'm used to talking to fourth graders! ;-)

When Reluctant Readers Finally Find a Book

How many of us have had a student who just can't seem to stick with a book? Like ever? Well, I've had a few, but one has really challenged me.

Rachel (not real name) is a fourth grade tomboy to the core. She's been in the Title I Reading program since Kindergarten, and although she has progressed, she just wouldn't stick with a book. I got her last year, and she changed books faster than some people change lanes in traffic.

I have thrown so many books at her that it's ridiculous. Goosebumps? No. Sports books? Only for a minute. Sharks? Cool. I read five pages. Just last week, we tried Notebook of Doom series (that I specifically bought with her in mind), Bunnicula, and a few books from the library that she checked out and quickly discarded. I've always believed this quote, but I was beginning to feel a little hopeless after more than a year of nothing sticking. Her teacher and I decided we would throw EVERY book we could possibly find at her in hopes of anything catching.

Then, last Friday, she came into my room with a book in hand and a BIG smile on her face. Time Warp Trio.

I met with her for our reading conference and decided not to set a "goal" with her just yet. She's struggled for so long, and I want her goal to be enjoying a book for once. I don't want her to feel like it's work. Especially not right now.

When we were down to ten minutes in the day, I told them to find a stopping point for me to read to them. She asked if she could just keeping reading her book. Of course! I wasn't going to stop her! 

Friday was exciting, but what really told me she was set was when she came back with the book on Monday. Then she was holding another one when she walked into my room the next day. 

I've hardly heard of the books (although I realized that I've heard parts of Da Wild, Da Crazy, Da Vinci, which is part of the set), but you can bet that I was on Amazon, Scholastic, and eBay as soon as I could to get my hands on more of them! She keeps asking for updates when they will be here, and I can't wait either!