McGuffey Readers

Notes pulled from resources on using the educational McGuffey Readers and for which grades in
each class.

McGuffey Readers, Which and Where?

Get the Eclectic Readers (Orange & Blue Covers) for more non-denominational less bible thumping,
and its phonics based.

Somewhere here there is a thread where someone analyzed the text and sho wed levels for all the books. I
copied the levels into a Word doc for myself, but have lost who originally did th e work (so, it's not me!), but here it is...

"I have just processed, with the Lexile Analyzer, prose samples from the McGuffey Readers that I’ve been able to find online. The books
are not in the Lexile database. And I don’t think poetry can be mechanically, yet accurately analyzed. Occasionally there is a sample that
isn’t aligned with the others in grade level, deviating from upper-level books normally, to 7th-grade, 8th-grade, or graduate-school level. I
have determined the general pattern, though, to be that the books cover a two-grade range in lower levels, and a range of several grades in
the higher levels. Because the Lexile Analyzer accepts selections of only one-thousand words at a time, I selected sections ranging from
several lessons in the beginnings of the primer and first books, to a few paragraphs each of two lessons in the same section in the later
books, checking the beginning and end in lower books, and also the middle parts of the higher books. I don’t believe
revisions have changed the grade levels, but think it would require a more thorough analysis of various editions, which I
don’t have access to, to be sure.

Here are the results:

Eclectic Primer: 1st grade

1st Eclectic Reader: 1st–2nd grades

2nd Eclectic Reader: 3rd–4th grades

3rd Eclectic Reader: 5th–6th grades

4th Eclectic Reader: 6th–8th grades

5th Eclectic Reader: 7th grade–college sophmore

6th Eclectic Reader: 9th grade–college senior