Age-appropriate reading = content + level

Getting your hands on quality books for your child is frustratingly difficult. Here, again, is the difference between the "foreign language" mindset and the "bilingual/bi-literate" or true immersion mindset.

Those of us who want to work toward true bilingualism and bi-literacy, we have a much, much harder time with resources across the board. Books are a major issue.

Too low of a level = boring.
Too high of a level = checking out (as in the brain checks out and doesn't pay attention).

A story that is uninteresting = boring.
A story with no plot line = boring.
A story with too much unknown vocabulary because the content is unknown = checking out.
A story with too much unknown vocabulary because the reading level is too high = checking out.

Chinese language educators often comment how, with a ball-parked 2-grades-below current grade level, that it is hard to keep engaging the "middle years," i.e., starting as early as 4th grade and going through 8th grade. The problem begins much earlier, but the cognitive developmental stage that changes at 4th and 5th grades makes the problem far more evident and more of a struggle. (I think native speaker Chinese parents, if they think back, this is the time when your little 乖乖 probably really rebelled against Chinese school.) This is part of why non-Chinese parents who have been happily doing MI during K-3 then have a big surprise at the end of elementary and into middle school, whereby all that wonderful progress of the earlier years turns into watching your kid trudge through sticky mud or tar.

One of the things that people have pointed to is the paucity of books with a reading level that works for 4th and 5th graders, while having content that is age-appropriate. They stop wanting to read about cute bunnies. But their reading level is not high enough to stop reading about cute bunnies.

There are more and more books coming online to bridge this problem. But the problem can be that you cannot get your hands on them. There are even more and more books with Pinyin that can bridge this problem. But your school may not know about them. Ordering online can be a real pain because you buy a bunch of books and they turn out not to work once you see the inside.

Solution? Get a group of parents together to focus on the problem. Buy a bunch of books. Hire a tutor to help you evaluate the books as a group. Develop a reading list to share with others. Do book reviews. Engage real-life kids as experiments. Have them do their "book report" as a review and why they would recommend it to another kid or not recommend it.