Reading Practice Books

A shelf of books, levelled by year, that take about fifteen minutes

Pick a year group and a topic, and you get books written to be read in roughly a quarter of an hour. That length is not a guess. Every book is measured against the reading speed for its year — 40 words a minute at Year 1, 100 at Year 3, 225 at Year 10 — and a book that comes out too long or too short does not reach the shelf.

It opens as a book rather than a web page: two pages side by side, a page turn, and no scrolling. On a phone it becomes a single page. The text size, line spacing, typeface and page colour are all yours to set, and the reader remembers where a child stopped.

What “Year 3 level” actually means here

Levelling is usually a claim. Here it is a measurement, and a book has to pass all of it:

• Length — within 15% of fifteen minutes at that year's reading pace.
• Sentence length — an average inside the band, and a hard cap on the longest sentence in the book. One 30-word sentence can undo a whole page for a struggling reader.
• Flesch–Kincaid grade — the standard readability score, inside a range set for that year.
• Syllables and long words — an average syllable count per word, and a ceiling on the share of words with three or more syllables.
• Paragraph length — capped, because the same words in shorter paragraphs are a genuinely easier read.

A book that misses any of those is rejected and rewritten, not published with a label on it.

British or American, from the same book

Every book is written once and rendered in either style. Switch it and the spelling changes throughout — colour and color, realised and realized, grey and gray — along with the vocabulary that genuinely differs, so a pavement becomes a sidewalk and autumn becomes fall. Dialogue takes single quotation marks in British style and double in American.

The year labels move too. Year 1 is shown as Kindergarten, Year 2 as Grade 1, and so on down the shelf, because British Year N is American Grade N−1 and treating them as the same number puts a child in front of the wrong book.

How the content is made, and checked

These books are written with the help of a language model, working to a fixed content policy, and every one is then checked by a person before it appears. We would rather say that plainly than let anyone assume a staff of authors they cannot see.

The policy is strict and it is applied automatically as well as by eye. No violence, no weapons, no death, no injury. No romance. No frightening or horror content. Nothing about alcohol, smoking, drugs or gambling. No brand names, no links, no phone numbers, and nothing that asks a child to contact anyone or share anything about themselves. Nothing a child could copy and be hurt by.

Difficulty is graded by age rather than banned outright. In Years 1 to 3 nothing is ever in danger: the stakes are a lost mitten or a cake that went wrong. From Year 4 a book may have mild, clearly resolved jeopardy. From Year 7 it may carry real tension — a hard climb, a failure that costs something — and still never violence or death. Every problem is resolved inside the book it appears in.

Questions at the end, and a reading card

Every book finishes with a handful of multiple-choice questions, all of them answerable from the book itself. There is no general knowledge in them and nothing that needs a leap the text does not support, because a question a careful reader cannot answer only teaches them that reading carefully does not help.

Each answer is explained straight away, which is where most of the learning actually happens. Then a reading card shows how many questions went well, how long the book took, and how many books have been finished so far. There is no pass mark, no failing, and no red crosses — a wrong answer dims and the right one lights up, so a child is shown what is true rather than marked for what was not. Any question that did not go well can be looked at again on the card.

The card stays in that browser. Nothing about what a child reads, or how they answered, is sent anywhere.

Bookmarks, and picking up where you stopped

The reader always remembers the page a book was left on. A bookmark is separate and deliberate: press the ribbon to keep a page you want to come back to, and every bookmark appears as a mark on the progress bar and as a button that jumps straight there. Books that have been started, or that hold a bookmark, are labelled on the shelf.

Add a story of your own

A parent, grandparent or teacher can paste in a story they have written and it joins the shelf, opening in exactly the same reader. Blank lines separate paragraphs, and a short line on its own becomes a chapter heading. A plain text file can be opened instead of pasting.

Two things are worth being straight about. The story is saved in that browser only — it is never uploaded, we never see it, and nobody else can open it. And because we never see it, our content rules do not apply to it: those govern the books on the shelf, not text you supply. What we can do is measure it, so the shelf will tell you the story reads at roughly Year 4 level and takes about eleven minutes. That figure comes from sentence and word length alone; whether the subject suits your child is something only you can judge.

No ads, no account, nothing following your child

This page carries no advertising at all. Not child-directed advertising, not non-personalised advertising — none. It is the one thing we were unwilling to put beside a child reading quietly for fifteen minutes.

There is no sign-in and no profile. The typeface you choose and the page a child stopped on are kept in that browser and nowhere else; they never reach us, and they do not follow anyone to another device. Nothing records which books a child reads.

What it is not

• It is not a reading scheme or a phonics programme, and it does not assess anybody. There are no scores and no levels to unlock.
• Levelling by formula is a genuine but blunt instrument. It measures sentences and syllables, not whether an idea makes sense to an eight-year-old. Trust a teacher over the label.
• There are no illustrations. These are books to read, not picture books, and the youngest band here already assumes a child who reads words.
• The reading times are averages. A child reading well below or above their year will finish faster or slower, and that is ordinary.