Search Tips

Age - Select your child's actual age. Or, if your child is mature for his/her age or for other reasons tends to like books written for older kids, you can select a higher age number. Similarly, if your child is developmentally delayed, or tends to like books written for younger kids, you can select a lower age than his/her actual age.

Reading Level - Select your child's current reading level. Many schools assess their students' reading level and let their parents or guardians know whether they're reading at grade level, above grade level, or below grade level. So for example, if you have a third-grader who is reading above grade level, you would select '4th grade' (or possibly '5th grade' if you have been told he/she is reading at 2 grade levels above his/her actual grade). On the other hand, if you have a child who is reading below grade level, you would select one or two grades below his/her current grade. If you are not sure, you can try the level that corresponds to your child's actual grade. Another way to decide which reading level to select is to find a book series on our list that you know is a good fit for your child, then look up that series' reading level, and search for other series that are at the same level. If you are still not sure which level to select, you can always choose "any" level to include all available book series for the age selected. Please also keep in mind that kids do not need to only read books at their current level. They can certainly still enjoy reading easier books and sometimes more challenging books as well. The most important thing is to find books the kids actually enjoy reading, so that they can be well on their way to becoming lifelong readers.

Reading Level Systems - We use a combination of reading level systems made available to the public for the purpose of rating the books in our database for our search function. The reading level for a book is sometimes provided by the publisher. In some cases, if the publisher does not provide a reading level for a particular series, we might use the recommended reading level determined by other sources, such as reputable public school systems' or other educators' published reading lists. Please note that sometimes a particular series will be rated differently by different organizations and thus the series might appear in multiple search results. You can see more information on the different reading level systems we use to rate our books here.

Advanced Search - The advanced search function lets you search by keyword, series or book title, author name, and category/genre, in additional to or instead of searching by the reader's age and/or reading level. If you're looking for a specific series but it's not coming up in the search results, please make sure you haven't mispelled the series title, author, or keyword. If you've entered both the title and the author's name, you may want to try searching just one or the other to see if the series comes up that way.

If you still can't find the series that you're looking for, please feel free to send us a request to add the series, and we'll either add the series or let you know if the series is already on the website but you're just not finding it for whatever reason. We do also log the searches that come up empty and periodically go through the list to see what our site users are looking for that's not there, and will add those series to the website eventually. However, we prioritize the series that have been requested specifically, so that's the faster way to get a series added if you don't want to wait too long.

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