Leveling

Children in the same grade and even the same classroom generally read at different levels. In order to address each student's specific needs and strengths, teachers review a wide variety of books at different reading levels. These "leveled texts" serve to meet instructional goals, foster independent reading, and help teachers match text to a student's individual ability and skills.

Early emerging readers need exposure to rhythm, rhyme and repetition. They need to learn the basic components of a book such as reading from left to right or matching the spoken word to the printed word. With this scaffolding technique, students are exposed to predictable text, decodable text, and sight words. As word difficulty and sentence length increase, so does the complexity of the story.

In more complex stories, students need to rely less on illustrations to provide meaning. When students begin reading more complex stories they apply a range of reading strategies that help master fluency and comprehension.

Book leveling is a systematic approach to evaluating features of text, including language usage, writing style, story elements, concepts, content, length, and illustrations. Assigning reading levels is not an exact science, but rather a method of comparing books. Reading levels also serve to help guide librarians, teachers, and parents in choosing appropriate books for children.

Please view our Reading Level Correlation Chart which assigns approximate relationships between the different attributes of leveling systems.