Choosing the right book: how our mentors do it

New mentors often ask us the same question in their first week: how do you know which book to bring? It sounds like a small thing. It isn't. Get it wrong and a twenty-minute reading session becomes a battle of wills. Get it right and you watch a child's shoulders drop an inch, because for once the book isn't a wall in front of them.

We train every mentor to think about two things at once: challenge and interest. A book that's too easy teaches a child nothing new and, worse, tells them reading is something you've already finished learning. A book that's too hard turns every page into a decoding exercise, and the story — the actual point of the whole thing — disappears under the effort of sounding out words. The sweet spot is what one of our longest-serving mentors calls "the wobble": a book where the child stumbles occasionally but keeps going, because they want to know what happens next.

Interest matters just as much as level. We've learned not to assume. A child who seems bored by a levelled reader about farm animals will sit rapt through a book about sharks two reading ages above where they're "supposed" to be, because curiosity does a lot of the decoding work for you. So in the first few sessions, mentors aren't really testing reading — they're testing appetite. What makes this particular seven-year-old lean forward? Football biographies. Ghost stories. Anything with a diagram of the inside of something. Once we know that, book choice stops being guesswork.

We also rotate deliberately between a child's "just right" book and something a full level below — a comfort read. Confidence is built cumulatively, and there's real value in a child finishing a book easily and feeling, if only for ten minutes, like a fluent reader. Mentors carry two or three options into every session for exactly this reason, and let the child choose between them. That small act of choosing does more for motivation than any of us anticipated when we started.

None of this is unique to Bright Futures Reading Trust — it's standard practice across children's literacy work, and largely why we ask mentors to spend their first few sessions listening more than teaching. But it took us longer than we'd like to admit to build it into training rather than leaving new mentors to work it out through trial and error. Now it's the first thing every volunteer learns, before phonics, before pacing, before any of it: find the book that makes them want to turn the page.