Finding Hi-Lo books has become easier!

Monday 19th September 2022

A recent upgrade to our website has made it easier than ever to find appropriate Hi-Lo books for your students. There are two major changes:

• Non-fiction titles are now in a separate category under Hi-Lo readers
• A new search facility by Interest Age, Grade Readability or Reading Age, and Lexile

Firstly, our Hi-Lo readers have been re-organised into three categories which can be found under Reading & Writing / Hi-Lo Readers in the category menu:

• Hi-Lo Fiction Primary
• Hi-Lo Fiction Primary
• Hi-Lo Non-Fiction

The split between Primary and Teen is based on Interest Age but depending on your students you might still want to look in both. If for example you have students in their early teens who are developmentally delayed then you might find appropriate books in the Primary category.

The new search options appear under the category menu - in the left sidebar on a computer, or at the top of the page on a phone. You can now search by:

• Interest Age, by specifying a range, eg. 12 to 15 or a specific age (enter age in the first box only)
• Grade Readability OR Reading Age. Our Hi-Lo books are mostly categorised by one or the other of these two measures of readability - you can enter a range or a single value for either of these but NOT both (doing this would find nothing).
• Lexile. If you want to find books with a Lexile measure (approximately 30% of our Hi-Lo books have this) then you can enter a range, eg. 500 to 700.

The data used to power these searches comes from our publishers and they do not all provide the same information. To get the most / best results we recommend searching with a combination of Interest Age and either Grade Readability or Reading Age, then repeating the search with the other readability category. So for example you could search for Interest Age 12 to 15 and Grade Readability 3, then repeat the search with Interest Age 12 to 15 and Reading Age 8.

We will keep working on improving the data quality that underlies these capabilities and categorisations, but you now have easy access to all the information that we use ourselves to answer customer questions about which books are appropriate for the students they are helping.