I will be homeschooling two of my neighbor's kids this year. Their dad is terribly disappointed with the level of eductaion his kids were getting in public school, and so I offered to teach them with my two. I think this will benefit my son, as he loves competition, and the other boy is in the same grade as he is.

I have chosen to do Tapestry of Grace with all of them, and in order to get into school a little quicker, I handed out some books to read in advance. I gave Oliver Twist to the 8th grader, and the lexicon value was too high for her to understand even one page. I found this site http://www.lexile.com and checked out the lexicon value - it is at a 10.6 grade level. I'm sad for her that she has been told that she is wonderful at English when this is so hard for her to read, but hopefully over the next few years she will find it easier to read big words.

Because of this problem, I have looked up the other books on the lit. list for the year, and have decided to leave the higher level books until the last few weeks. In the meantime, I will add in a vocab. workbook to try and help them get up to par with my two.

To do your own lexicon search, click on the link, and you will see a link to the database. While it is not inexhaustible, it did list most of the books on my list.