Teaching children to read is a crucial objective for all schools, wherever your school is based in the world and whatever curricula you choose to follow.
As children become confident and competent in reading, they gain the power to access knowledge and information from an ever-growing range of sources – gaining the ability to make connections, to deepen their understanding and to pursue their own interests.
At Oxford University Press (OUP), we have been developing levelled reading books for over thirty years, advised by some of the world’s leading experts in reading. Our collective experience of creating books at ‘just the right level’ draws on the expertise of renowned children’s authors, illustrators, and designers – who are all involved in the levelling process and ensuring our books appeal to young readers.
Over the last 18 months, OUP has undertaken an analysis of over 2000 levelled reading books from across our most popular series including Oxford Reading Tree. We have looked in detail at the language data and the ‘science’ as well as reflecting on the essential human expertise – the ‘art’ – that informs our content decisions. Our aim is to help teachers to understand what we do when we create a book for a certain level. We hope you find this collection of articles and case studies useful in informing the reading strategy at your school.
