I recently came across a link to a tool created by Scholastic to help teachers find books for their students. They ask for the title of the book your child is reading, then provide books of a similar level in response. You can also specify that you’re looking for books that are at a higher or lower reading level than the book you’d first entered. You can even choose to limit your results based on a wide variety of other criteria, depending on the results you get from your initial search. I had the best luck finding results appropriate for kids reading at no higher than the 8th grade reading level.
The Scholastic Teacher Book Wizard BookAlike might be worth a look. The main drawback I found is that the search is geared towards teachers, and some of their results are only available for purchase by educators. If you find that a book you’d be interested in purchasing for your child happens to fall into that category, use the Amazon link on the right side of this page to see if the book might be available there. ABC is an Amazon affiliate, and any purchase you make returns a small referral payment to ABC and the work we do for the highly capable students in the Puyallup School District.
Give the BookAlike search a try, and let us know what you think. Finding appropriate reading material for highly capable readers can be a challenge. If you know of any other options out there, we’d love to hear about those, too.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Has anyone else tried this? Was it useful? I know how challenging it can be to find reading material that is an appropriate reading level for my kids, while also being age appropriate.