Answers to Some of Your Questions

In my last post, I suggested leveling our Fox reading selections to assign guided reading levels. Unfortunately, this is not an option. There are some differences between the Fox leveling and Fountas and Pinnell. I came across information in Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children (Fountas and Pinnell) that I wanted to share. This information answers some questions that have been brought up in the past few months. As we begin to gather materials for guided reading, Fountas and Pinnell suggest using any set of leveled materials we are comfortable with including the district basal. Each selection in a basal needs to be looked at carefully for text quality and leveling. Level of difficulty often varies from story to story. In the lower grade levels, be aware that stories often contain controlled vocabulary and unnatural language that often makes the text more difficult. Moving on to classroom libraries, Fountas and Pinnell feel that most books in the classroom library do not need to be organized by level. They can be grouped by topic, author, genre or other categories. Only some baskets of books would be leveled.