Hi HN, Bookvine.io helps find age appropriate books for kids, with links to get it from Amazon or your local county library (limited to US for now). This was created by my 13yr old son who is an avid reader. I used to spend hours trying to get the right books for him to read and then get it from local county library or Amazon. He wanted to create this site from the books that he has read - to help others in a similar situation.
He used Webflow to create the site (I am a software engineer and guided him thru the process and some custom JS coding that was required) More about the story in the About Page. We would love some feedback or suggestions, to help improve the website. (there are no ads/no sign up/no monetary benefit etc) There are almost 300 books, along with reviews and recommendations - categorised by age - to make it easier for parents and kids to pick the next book to read easily.
He's doing a fantastic job! I haven't started going through the list yet, but the categories providing a competence description are a godsend for parents of kids who are ahead or behind of their age bracket. Well done to him!
This is fantastic. Thanks so much to your son for curating this list and creating the site. We will start working our way through these recommendations.
The same goes for the inverse. It can be discouraging for kids behind in reading to be assigned content based on their age (or grade) only for it to be far too challenging.
It’s a hard problem though because categorization makes it easy to organize content and find what you’re looking for, but it can also feel like a competition, which is not always helpful.
Each grade level has 4 "levels". But each kid is on their own track. And while those books have assigned grades, the teacher assigns a pool of books for each kid based upon their actual reading level. And each week, the kids are supposed to pick 4 books from their pool to take home and read.
My daughter is in 1st grade and every week picks 4 "R/S" books (3rd grade). She has a friend that still picks books in the "D/E" category (late kindergarten/early 1st grade).
That's similar to what I recall from school myself, 20+ years ago. Iirc ours was based on colours, which was a nice dual because as you got more advanced the colour names themselves progressed from easy primary colours to secondary, tertiary - nicher vocabulary for the colour names before you'd even opened the book.
Totally agree with you on all the points. As with most recommendations - YMMV.
This is just to provide a guideline/reference. The way I recommend seeing this list is - say your kid likes "The Penderwicks" then..."hey are few other books that are similar to The Penderwicks"
Yes, definitely. I hope my comment didn't come across as criticism! I love seeing sites like your kid's.
I was more lamenting the general difficulty of the problem. (And possibly just the lack of books that are suitable for kids who are advanced at reading, but have interests similar to other kids their age.)
Not taking it as criticism. I totally agree with you.
I think as a parent of these advanced kids it puts more onus on the parent and kid to work together to identify appropriate books based on these reference points.
I don't think this is a big deal, as IME kids don't find age inappropriate titles interesting enough to read. My wife is an elementary librarian and kids in grade 4 or less just don't like YA aimed at the 12+ crowd.
I always found it interesting how different books for teenagers were from movies considered appropriate for the same age group.
For example, the "Cherub" series by Robert Muchamore, which I greatly enjoyed as a kid, included crime, drug and alcohol use (even by kids), sex scenes, mentions of underage prostitution and human trafficking, and even a scene of an attempted rape on a minor. The much more popular "Hunger Games" series was a little bit less violent, but not by much. Nobody seemed to mind. Those books were clearly intended for teenagers, I'd say 12-16 year olds, and there were no disclaimers about what those books contained.
Even with TV, things aren't as obvious as they seem. Over here in Poland, very few parents care about age restrictions. Unlike English, we don't even have a word for "explicit content". Creating online accounts with fake dates of birth is pretty much normal. When I was in middle school, most people I knew watched porn with very few difficulties. Game stores don't have any obligations to restrict what kids can buy, it's not even clear if refusing a game sale based solely on the age of the buyer is legal[1]. When one game store refused to sell GTA5 to a kid, I heard about it on the news. When I compare people of my generation raised in Poland to our American peers, where explicit content is much more of a taboo, I see no noticeable effects of watching such content.
This has some disturbing censorship implications, how many real-life phenomena are filmmakers omitting to get just a little bit more viewers, just because of some well-intended laws that seem to have no actual positive effect on society?
I would like to see the teens break out of the sameness of all the books in the young adult market and read more "adult" books. By adult, I mean some of the less cookie cutter book history has to offer. Yes, I realize there are formulaic books for adults as well, but the young adult market takes it to another level.
I could also live with no more stories about saving society or the world and how it happens to have fallen about a teenager where they aren't sure what looks best to wear and can't decide between several people as a romantic partner among those who are helping them along their quest.
Well done, this is great. I’ve already sent my wife a link to it. We are mostly through the original magic treehouse series and we need a new book series to read to our 4 year old. Amazon search is a wasteland for this sort of thing.
Let’s talk SEO. You need pages like this:
books-for-6-year-olds
books-for-7-year-olds
Etc
We have a site crontab.guru and you would not believe the traffic we get on our “every n minutes” pages. Long tail!
One more.. in your book pages I would change /series/ to /review/
Thanks a lot for the feedback and suggestions. Hope you find the site it useful. Totally agree with you, SEO is definitely an area to focus on so we can get organic search traffic.
btw - good fun series to pick up post Magic treehouse would be - Press Start, geronimo stilton/Thea stilton and Dogman to name a few.
Haha I love crontab.guru! It fits perfectly for me who uses cron schedules only 1-2 times a year, just infrequently enough to forget the format before needing it again.
These books have great pencil drawings and text paragraph under each picture. They are not like Japanese cartoons which have almost no text. Their drawings are also not cartoonish.
Come to the US, I couldn’t find anything similar. There’s no new publication of these kind of books in China either.
Suggestion: I'm looking at the 10-14 list. When I click "Next Page", it retains the "book series" section on top and the actual next page I have to scroll halfway down the screen to see. I'm not expecting to have to skip over the book series section again to get to the next page of individual books. Difficult and confusing, at best.
Love it. School and county/city libraries are great under utilized resources. That is one of the reason we put the library links directly as well. During COVID my son used a ton of the ebook lending from our local County library.
Overall, this appears to be a learning project for a middle schooler and his dad as well as a way for them to cover costs through affiliate links. While this might be a fun and useful way to discover new books, you should read the reviews and cross-reference your findings with parental or specialty groups like teachclean.com if you are concerned about the subject matter.
Yes. Thanks for sharing this. We have not even put any affiliate links. As you rightly pointed out - this is purely a learning project and at the same time a way to help others who were having the same issue as me (spending lot of time identifying good books to read).
Out of curiosity, why did you put quotes around the word "marriage"?
Am I correctly interpreting your comment as implying that same-sex marriage is not legitimate, and that children should not be aware of its existence (or at least, that its inclusion makes a book inappropriate for children)?
I think people get very upset quickly, and I dont want to be upsetting.. so lets not argue in any case, even if we do not agree..
I come from a religious background, and I support plural, open society myself. So same-sex couples are a thing, and people do that.. so they are free to do that.. as I am free to pursue a stricter social definition.
There are people on both sides of this discussion, that feel so strongly about their point of view, that they actively, definitely, without apology and sometimes by unfair means, seek to present, influence and be role models for children in formative stages of learning.
Therefore, on both sides of this topic, I believe that "open" material like books for children, that there needs to be safety and guidelines, in the clear open discussion, about what is in them.. for the parents, family and their social groups to make their own decisions.
Lastly, you are right, I added quotes around "Marriage" because in my tradition, Marriage means a sacred union of one man and one woman. I am committed to support "civil unions" for legal rights of same sex couples, especially high-stakes end-of-life things like medical authority and inheritance, but no one cares about me personally, these are large topics that are decided in a civil process. I support that civil process.
The most common same-sex analogue to heterosexual marriage by far is in fact sworn brotherhood. "Gay marriage" is a modern innovation that mostly matters as an indication of legal status, but not a good descriptor of actual social relationships. Teach your kids about sworn brotherhood, and they will be very well equipped to understand the implications of gay marriage, when that (along with the non-trivial complexities of things like sexual orientation, which will be quite simply illegible and irrelevant to them prior to the biological changes of adolescence) becomes more relevant to them.
That's an absurd argument. Reductio ad absurdum. Every parent has the right to determine when and how their kids learn about various developmental and sexual topics.
Hmm, about 100 years of progressive era educational reforms would like to argue with you about that.
Why is it that we consider sexual topics the one line that needs parental consent to learn or teach about? Seventeenth century American Puritanism, mostly.
ya going to disagree here... society/education needs to play a big role here.
Parents should homeschool their kids if they want that kind of control. Otherwise they should trust the education system to teach this and do the research to know when they should be taught.
Parents should not be able to justify abusing their kids by homeschooling them either.
The idea that same-sex marriage is a "sexual topic" but marriage between a man and a woman is not is patently ridiculous and we need to start recognizing that it's a cover for a hateful ideology. If ignored we're going to see the repeal of not just Obergefell but probably even Lawrence within the next two decades.
Ya I agree, but that isn't ever going to pass as a law in the USA given the religious right and broken culture. I think everyone should go to public school and outlaw private schools as well. Everyone should start from the same system.
