Book Review: Reading 123 閱讀123

Age：8 (Thumper) & 6.75-8 (Astroboy)
Grade Level: 5-6 yrs old (read to), mostly 1st-2nd, some 3rd
Publisher: 天下雜誌／親子天下

Last September, when Thumper started reading, I told her that if she read 100 books, I’d buy her a telescope.  I made up a reading log for her.

She was busy updating this log tonight and telling me about how many 閱讀123 Reading 123 books she’s read in the last few weeks.   So I decided to actually take a look at what she’s read so far.  She binge reads and it’s taking her about 30 minutes to go through one of the Reading 123 books.  At this rate, I really need to find more 3rd-4th grade books ASAP.

Reading 123 is a series put out by CWBooks.  It was designed specifically as bridge books (e.g. chapter books).  There are currently 60 books in the series, though I only have 48.  Most of the books are considered 中低 (1st-3rd), with a few, especially the later ones, in the 中高 (3rd-6th).  I think it’s more 1st-2nd and 3rd-4th.

The nice thing about this series is that the publisher has written in the back, the number of characters in each book.  I believe it ranges from ~5-10k for the lower level and up to 20k for the higher level.  Another thing I like is that they are not translated text like 東方出版社 Eastern Books‘ 故事摩天輪 series, plus the illustrations are mostly very nice, unlike the other bridge books series I’ve been looking at the last few days such as Hsin-Yi’s Children Reading Train  (信誼 兒童閱讀列車)  or gKids’ Story Fairy Tree (小天下 故事奇樹).

Yes, I’m picky.

Baby Library has a very good info page on all the books in the series, with short summaries and cover pics.  The series has a lot of sub-series.  For example, there is a set of books called 屁屁超人 (how do I translate that?  Fart Man?).  A series that some parents object to because it’s about farts.  More specifically it’s about a boy who gets his super power through his super farts.   He uses his super power to help the children in school, against the evil principal.  There is another set about a fire breathing dragon 小火龍,  a third set, one of my favorite, of rewritten Chinese folklores, and lastly, a few books about life in Taiwan 30-40 years ago, Thumper’s favorite.

There are other sets as well (mystery, non-fiction, etc).  What I like is the broad range of books in the series, with some more literary and others more mass paperback appeal (e.g. Fart Man).  I don’t love the Fart Man 屁屁超人 series, but I don’t object to it too much because the writing isn’t really too coarse or the characters misbehaving.

Oh, if you want to ever read a whole research paper about Reading 123 and Bridge books, check it out here.

I ended up spending 3-4 hours inputting Thumper’s books into aNobii, which is like Goodreads except you can put in Chinese books!  I spent a lot of time tagging the books.  The great thing is now I have a very good idea of how many books she’s read in the last 6 months and the level of the books.   I also got to ask Thumper to rate the books;  totally gives me an idea of what she liked and what she didn’t liked.

Below are the list of 60 books, copied from Baby Library.  I’ve been told that book #13 is out of print, and the publisher now has just 1 complete set of book left in stock.  Other vendors may have complete sets but the group order I put together kind of cleaned the publisher out.  Not sure if they will reprint.  I’m glad I got #13 蟲來沒看過 before it went out of print.  I can see why it wasn’t popular.  It’s non-fiction buried in fiction land.  Though Thumper loved #14 about elephants (What! You can make paper out of elephant poop?!).

Edited to Add July 2018:

Three years later I still love love love Reading 123.  If you’re a lazy mom like me and you don’t want to research your books, you just want one set that gives you a variety of writing styles, genres, content types, this is the series for you.  Your kid is not going to love every book, but your kid ought to be given the option to read every book.  In fact, I that we just have this main set for our Level 1 & 2 books and Astroboy is forced to read it.  He is forced to read non-fiction and Chinese folklore, which he would not choose if he had a bunch of other books to read.

When it comes to books, I treat it like food, the kids don’t really have a choice and cannot just read the things they enjoy.  I won’t force them to read, but I try to create an environment that takes away other more delicious but junky choices.  It’s a matter of lack of time given we’re bilingual homeschooling.  Every book they read has to kind of count.  As it is, I don’t feel like it’s counting as much as I like.

Chinese Reading Levels

• Level 0 (0-2500 characters) (32 pages)  Kindergarten, First Grade, 25L
• Level 1 (2500-5000 characters) 1:1 ratio (~64 pages), First Grade, 100L
• Level 2 (5k-10k characters) 2:1 ratio (64-128 pages), Second Grade, 200L
• Level 3 (10k-20k characters) 3:1 ratio, Second Grade, 350L
• Level 4 (20-40k characters) (150+ pages) mostly no illustration, series books, 3rd grade, 550L

Reading Order

If you look through the table of books, you can see that there are quite a few mini series in Reading 123.  It is kind of hard to recommend level, because more than character count, I find the kids have problems with the subject matter vocabulary and content maturity level.  For example, several people tell me their kids don’t like 屁屁超人, because it’s talking about Taiwanese school.  All the 民間故事 books have very low character count, but because it’s talking about folktales, it’s a bit hard for the kids as they’re not familiar with the vocabulary.  The same goes for the non-fiction 知識讀本 series.

In any case, here’s the order that Astroboy picked the books.  Sometimes he would not know what to pick off of the bookshelf so I had to make some suggestions.  I would say it took a long time for him to get over the hump of reading the 5000 character books.  Once he finished Magic Treehouse, he had the stamina to come back to Reading 123 and go through the books.  He got pulled into Dahl books then came back to Reading 123 again and I’m fairly certain he can read the high character counts now and is more interested in the more advanced stories.

He’s still got a few of the books close to 20k count that he hasn’t touched.  But since he’s moving onto Reading 456 books I may be able to suggest these books to him when he’s done.  These books feel harder than the Reading 456 fun books he’s reading because of content.

• 屁屁超人 (1 year ago, he doesn’t love it but didn’t want to pick up the other books)
• 企鵝熱氣球
• 小火龍 series
• 小珍珠 series
• 小東西 series
• 我家 series
• 民間故事
• 知識讀本 non-fiction series
• 小熊兄妹的點子屋 series
• 坐車來的圖書館 (level 3)
• 湖邊故事 (level 3) (He ran out of books he wanted to pick so he’s not picking the harder books here)
• more 知識讀本 non fiction series
• 怪博士與妙博士 (level 3)
• 飛客尋的秘密 (level 3-4)
• Went off to read Dahl series before we borrowed a stack of books post #60)
• 貓巧可 (level 2)
• 妖怪小學
• 小熊寬寬與魔法提琴

List of All Books

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