[TeacherBug08]

What do you do if you can't find a books guided reading level?

[Audrey's mom]

Do you mean when you organize your library?

I have books organized by level and some organized by genre or type. Some of my baskets organized by specific characters, authors, non-fiction topic, etc.

[TeacherBug08]

Yes, for my classroom library. So if you can't find books you see if you can group them into a category?

[jcflies]

I always seem to have a group of books that slip between the cracks! I label these as "Just Right Books" with the question, "Can YOU find one?" I give a mini-lesson about using the 5 finger strategy to find a JR book. I figure that if/when they go to the library they encounter a similar situation, so they should practice finding a good fit.

[jov]

If the book fits into one of my author-topic-genre-series baskets in my larger classroom library, I put it there. If I really want to include the book in one of my leveled baskets, I take an educated guess by comparing the text and picture support to known leveled texts.

[GoldiTeaches]

I make my best guess actually. Sometimes you can find other books in the same series, by the same author, or whatever and can use that. A lot of the time though I grab a handful of books I know the exact level for and look through them to decide which ones the book most closely matches and I level the book with that level. Is it an exact science? No. Will it kill a child to pick up a level E book that was maybe supposed to actually be a D or a F? Absolutely not.

I look at the sight words, the length of the sentences, how many sentences are on the page, how much the pictures help with tricky words, if there is dialogue, questions, if the words have inflectional endings, if the words kids would be sounding out are typically one syllable, two syllables, or three syllables, etc.

Sometimes I've changed the level of a book after kids have read it because I realized I had the book leveled either too easy or too hard...no biggie as long as its fairly close.

[HeatherJ]

I have found some book levels on the Level It app.

[Marcigran]

My GR books are leveled from publishers.

But the books kids choose as just right/good fit are not leveled (hundreds of books). A few years ago I sorted all these books into 3 categories. Easiest ones have green sticker on front and are kept in baskets with green stickers on label. They probably are levels A to D. Next group have red label and range E to I. My blue sticker books (J and above, including most chapter books) make final group.

By the time kids are ready to select their own books, I have good idea about their reading levels. I direct them to appropriate color baskets. Then they use 5 finger process to find good fit books for themselves.

I have used the Book widget off the scholastic website to look up levels our district also has a subscription to the F/P website to look for levels. My books in the classroom are sorted by topic, genre and authors-then leveled within. We also have a book room where there is multiple copies and many different titles at each level we can choose from.