Where Readers
Are Made
Redefining the Way Readers Are Grown
Strong readers aren’t born—they’re grown.
They’re grown through four pillars:
📖 Reading together: shared reading that involves parents reading to children, children reading aloud to parents, and children reading independently.
👀 Modeling reading: an incredibly underrated way for kids to see their parents enjoy books or reading every day.
💬 Communication with parents and teachers: decoding expectations from schools but also using each other as community to help each other support young readers at home.
🏡 Living a reading life: integrating literacy naturally into everyday life.
Booktrition captures each of these pillars and breaks them down by grade, giving families clear guidance on how to support their child’s reading at every step.
Reading Together
Top Kindergarten Picks
Top First Grade Picks
Top Second Grade Picks
Top Third Grade Picks
By combining the best of art and science, Booktrition recommends the optimal independent* reading 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!
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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.
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Meet Libby Pingpank and Booktrition
Contact
askbooktrition@gmail.com
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