Growing young readers with books to read independently and aloud to parents

Summer Reading

Children lose 20-30% of reading gains made during the school year over the summer. Educators call this regression the “summer slide,” which can equate to falling behind by almost half a grade level in just two months. The good news is reading loss can be eliminated by having a child independently read just 4-6 books over the summer!

Into First Grade

Into Second Grade

Into Third Grade

Booktrition eliminates the guesswork from choosing the optimal books to give to young readers for independent* reading. By combining the best of art and science, Booktrition recommends books for readers in kindergarten through third grade.

Throughout the site, and unlike publisher’s in-house leveling systems, books are systematically placed within each grade level to reflect the scope and sequence of the phonics taught in the classroom.

This means the leveling of each book is scientific and data-driven, without the bias and inconsistency inherent to other rubrics.

In addition to the science, our book recommendations are selectively and artfully chosen because of their child-friendly themes: empathy, kindness and love, and with topics these readers will find engrossing. Because in addition to growing young, well-rounded readers, we also need to help grow young and well-rounded humans!

* We define “independent reading” as reading alone or reading aloud to a parent or teacher with minimal help from the caregiver. Research shows young readers make more reading gains when a parent, teacher or caregiver helps to “scaffold” reading through use of properly-leveled books (where the child is able to decode 80%-95% of words, without guessing based on pictures or context clues). This yields the very best results particularly through second grade, when learners are actively still acquiring new phonics skills. More on this, and so much more, on our blog and instagram.

Booktrition Data

Throughout the site, and unlike publisher’s in-house leveling systems, books are systematically placed within each grade level to reflect the scope and sequence of the phonics taught in the classroom. This means the leveling of each book is scientific and data-driven, without the bias and inconsistency inherent to other rubrics. So just how exactly did Booktrition do this? By collecting the data of course! And, to be precise, we’re talking about phonetic data. For each book from kindergarten through most of second grade, Booktrition collected and cataloged every single word, totaling over 21,000 words. But why do this? By leading the leveling system within the Booktrition website with phonetic data, books were able to be placed appropriately and analyzed for decodability. On average, a book was placed within in a designated part of the school year if the data found that the combined highly phonetic and sight words totaled at least 80%. In the aggregate of all data collected, there are also excellent learning opportunities for our young readers, parents and educators. Want to see more data broken down by grade? We invite you to take a look at The Data page.

The Data