Leveling Books

Fountas and Pinnell offer two resources for leveling books: The Fountas and Pinnell Leveled Book List, K-8+ and a subscription website. Today, I learned how to Level Books without the benefit of these resources. I'll be happy to go over this with anyone who wants to learn the process. To begin, you must read the book and analyze the text for the following: genre, text structure, content, themes and ideas, language and literary features, sentence complexity, vocabulary, words, illustrations, book and print features. The information is recorded on a chart and then compared against the Continuum to identify a guided reading level. If anyone is interested in literacy resources or professional development ideas, visit www.heinemann.com . Fountas and Pinnell are presenting in Philadelphia on 4/21/10. The topic is When Readers Struggle: Teaching that Works. Additional information can be found on the site. Some other names I've heard frequently this week are Carl Anderson and Katie Wood Ray.