Friday, July 20, 2012

Classroom Library Week {Part 5} Leveling Your Classroom Library Books

Leveling your classroom library is helpful not only to your students, but will also be a great tool for you.   Most of the books in my classroom library are leveled.  What do I mean by leveled?  Each book has a sticker on the the spine with the Guided Reading Level that the book is on.

Each year at the beginning of the year, I always do a DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) test on all of my students to evaluate what Guided Reading Level they are on.  This helps them to more easily determine if a book is right for them when shopping for books in my classroom library.  Finding out their guided reading level is also helpful to me when planning a Guided Reading lesson or helping them choose a book they might enjoy.

Scholastic has a free chart that you can access HERE that will tell you what guided reading level they are on if you know their DRA or Lexile level.  I have one created that I will share with you-all in a few weeks when I can get to my Reading Binder (that is stuck in storage :).

Reading A to Z is a wonderful website, and they have a FREE book leveling tool that will give you the Guided Reading Level a book is on!  Check out their awesome website HERE.

Scholastic also has a really awesome book leveling tool called Scholastic Book Wizard.  Simply type the name of the book in the search box and it will give you a grade level equivalent of what level the book is on.  You can then go back to the chart above to help you figure out which level the book is on.   You could also use THIS CHART from Reading A-Z to help with grade level correlations.

Some other FREE leveling sites I've found are:
Leveled Book Lists
440 Book Titles


Another site that I just found, but have never used, is the Fountas and Pinnell Leveling Site.  This looks awesome and very helpful.  The only downside is that you have to pay to use it.  Although it would be definitely worth it if you could get your school to pay for it! :)

So, how do you level your classroom library books?  Any great leveling websites you want to share?


Dreaming of chowmein noodles,