Hi Keri,
Thanks so much for your comment and for sharing your own experiences. From my perspective, you’re doing SUCH great things to support your son’s emergent reading. He will love reading because of you (and in spite of the leveled reading experiences he has at school). You’re so wise to share texts with your son that vary in complexity, emotion, genre, topic etc…and it sounds as though you spend a great deal of time thinking critically, with him, about the value in each text you read. As you decipher the reading scores, keep in mind that reading “level” is often a measure of fluency — which is a measure of how quickly your son can decode words and say them aloud. Often, these measures don’t take into consideration prosody — or the fact that oral language, when read with meaning, should vary in pace. Instead, you move up a level if you read harder words faster. If you’re concerned about your child’s comprehension, I would recommend that you talk with his teacher — but also remember that comprehension is a very complex and dynamic set of skills that develop over time. Even as adults, we continue to develop more sophisticated strategies for constructing meaning from different kinds of texts (e.g., think of how you read online vs. how you read print). At home, you can encourage your son to take his time with his words — and reinforce that good reading does not necessarily equal FAST reading. Rather, you can tell him that good readers often stop, ponder, think, go back, summarize what they’ve read in their head, ask themselves questions, take time to predict what might happen next, make connections between what they’ve just read and things they already know…etc. etc. etc. What you’re already doing at home is so supportive of your son’s emergent comprehension skills — keep picking up those beautiful picture books and everything else that you love to share together!

I have much to do in understanding comprehension just to feel comfortable I’m on the right track. I’m looking forward to spending more time on your blog.