How do I know what kind of book my child should be reading?  Or, what does "benchmark" mean? 

I know that we keep talking about levels of books and where your child should be, so I thought I would let you know where your child needs to be by the end of 1st grade.

An end of 1st grade book has the following characteristics:

• 300-400 words
• 4-12 lines per page
• 8-9 average words per sentence
• No reliance on predictable pattern
• Richer vocabulary
• Pictures used to enhance understanding
• 14 pages

I look at how well your child actually read the words (the decoding) as well as if they understood the story and could tell about it in their own words. I also look to see if once they read something incorrectly, could they go back and correct it. That is called a self-correction rate. This ratio means that if I wrote 1:2, they corrected 1 out of every 2 mistakenly read words by themselves. For a 1:4 ratio, it would be a correction of 1 out of every 4. Just as we make mistakes when we read aloud and automatically adjust them, so do the children.

My goals for a grade level book (Again, this is a book for this point and time in 1st grade.) are 90% or better for number of words read correctly, 80% or better of the comprehension questions answered correctly and a self correction rate of 1:2 to 1:4.