One fox, one moon, eight books
Below is page 3 of the same book, written for a 2 year old and then for a 9 year old and for every age in between. Nothing about the book changes except the writing.
Page 3 of the-fox-who-chased-the-moon, at every age it writes for
Age 2
Board book. Big shapes, one line a page, plenty of repeating.
- Pages
- 6
- Words a page
- 6
- Mins to read
- 2
The fox ran. The moon ran too.
Age 3
Short rhyming lines. Nothing to work out, just rhythm.
- Pages
- 6
- Words a page
- 9
- Mins to read
- 2
Fox ran quick across the hill.
The moon stayed put, and hung there still.Age 4
Simple sentences, with something familiar coming back every few pages.
- Pages
- 8
- Words a page
- 14
- Mins to read
- 3
The fox ran up the hill after the moon. The moon did not run. It just waited, round and yellow, at the top of the sky.
Age 5
A small problem turns up, and gets solved kindly.
- Pages
- 8
- Words a page
- 20
- Mins to read
- 4
The fox chased the moon all the way up the hill, but the moon never got any closer. So the fox sat down in the wet grass and thought about it properly.
Age 6
Longer sentences, a bit of humour, one new word a page.
- Pages
- 10
- Words a page
- 28
- Mins to read
- 5
However fast the fox ran, the moon stayed exactly where it was: enormous, patient and entirely uninterested. Which was, the fox decided, quite rude behaviour for something so bright.
Age 7
Chapters in miniature. The character wants something and gets in her own way.
- Pages
- 10
- Words a page
- 36
- Mins to read
- 6
The fox had chased the moon for eleven nights, and on the eleventh she finally understood the trick of it. You cannot catch a thing that is already everywhere. You can only sit still enough to notice it has been keeping you company all along.
Age 8
Richer vocabulary, and a turn near the end they will not see coming.
- Pages
- 12
- Words a page
- 44
- Mins to read
- 7
She had been running for so long that she had stopped asking why. The moon, for its part, had watched foxes chase it for four and a half billion years, and had grown rather fond of them. Tonight it decided to do something it had never done before.
Age 9
Close to a real chapter book. Something in it for them to chew on.
- Pages
- 12
- Words a page
- 52
- Mins to read
- 8
There is a particular loneliness in wanting something that cannot want you back, and the fox had carried it up eleven hills without once putting it down. What she learned on the twelfth was not how to catch the moon. It was how to walk home under it, unhurried, and call that enough.
What is actually changing
Not the vocabulary alone, which is the trick most reading-level tools stop at. The sentence length changes, the amount of repetition changes, the number of ideas held open at once changes, and at the older end the story acquires a turn — something that lands differently on the second reading, which a six year old is ready for and a three year old is not.
The page count moves with it too, from six pages of about six words at the young end to twelve pages of fifty-odd at the top, and the reading time with it — roughly two minutes at 2, roughly eight at 9. The figures beside each level below are the ones the press is working to.
Why this matters if there are two of them
Two children three years apart normally means two bedtimes or one compromise, and the compromise is usually the older one being read something they have outgrown. The same idea coming out as two books means they can have had the same story that night and each have had one written for them, which is a thing a shop cannot sell you at any price.
How the level gets set
You tell the press once who lives in the house and roughly how old they are, and it writes to fit from then on. That is a setting on a device on your worktop. This website never asks for it, never stores it, and has no field anywhere for anything about a child — the demonstration on the homepage runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.
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