What a Reading Program Used to Be
Many of us remember being the reading program from when we began school. Although they were supposed to be coded or named in a way that obscured ability, it was still easy to know that the "Turtles" were beginning readers or those who used the "Red book" were the most advanced readers in the class. In those days, that was leveled reading, in that each textbook represented a higher level. However, teaching reading has changed a lot since those days and what you think of as leveled reading may be very different from the reality.
What Reading Looks Like Now
Although the reading systems teachers use differ from school to school and district to district, the overall approach to teaching reading has changed. It's no longer about making sure a child can literally sound out the words on the page and have a vague understanding of the story. Some classrooms may use textbooks, but those textbooks no longer contain contrived stories designed to introduce vocabulary words, they have excerpts from published books, poems and essays.
Reading now is part of a bigger component of learning referred to as "language arts," an integrated system of learning in which reading is an important part of all of the day. A teacher who is teaching a unit about the life cycle, for example, may choose to use series of non-fictions books about caterpillars and butterflies as a way to introduce concepts that will be extended in science class. The writing assignment for the day probably reflects the same theme and may ask students to write in the same format as the book they read earlier in the day.
How Does Leveled Reading Fit In?
Even though this type of reading relies heavily on singly published books, it's still important for the books students are reading to be matched to their ability. Often times, teachers will select a variety of books about the same subject, but which deal with the topic in a simpler or more complex way, according to the student's ability.
Depending on the leveling system the teacher is using, these books may be labeled numerically, alphabetically or by grade level. The important thing is that the library of books is leveled by the same scale or system and is big enough to accommodate students' growth. This set of books is sometimes referred to as a leveled book collection.
Are the Step Readers at the Bookstore the Same as a Leveled Book Collection?
Parents who want to start a leveled book collection for their children frequently turn to the series of "step" and "level" books that are commonly found at the bookstore. These books are usually part of a series put out by publishers like Scholastic's Hello Reader, Random House's Step Into Reading, or Harper Trophy's I Can Read books.
While these series are very good for children learning to read in that they help to introduce vocabulary and gradually increase in difficulty, the criteria for the leveling is slightly different than that of classroom book collections. When choosing their own books or a publisher's reading system, teachers tend to examine the books for some of the following qualities:
- Length & Layout: The number of pages, word and lines per page are important considerations, as is the size of the font. Books for beginning readers should have clearly defined spaces between words and sentences contained to one page. More advanced readers are able to read smaller fonts and carry a sentence from line to line or one page to the next.
- Vocabulary & Structure: Books for beginners will rely on simple core words and repetition to tell a story, which is often illustrated in a way to help a child gain meaning from the pictures. As readers advance, the books have more complex plots that have a beginning, middle and end and are told in multi-syllabic words and with common idioms that need interpretation.
- Content &Theme: Beginning books will focus on things that children know about and experience in their own lives, making it easier to relate to the book. As students advance, the leveled books become more complex, introducing ideas that are not familiar and moving from fiction to non-fiction.
How To Choose Books for Your Child
If you want to choose books for your child that are similar to the type of books he's reading in school, start by asking his teacher what leveling system is being used in the classroom. Next try to get a sense of what themes and types of books interest your child. Is he into trains? Does he like to learn about history?
Then, visit a website like Scholastic's Book Wizard. This site is particularly helpful because you can search for books by different leveling systems, genre, author and a number of other criteria. Or, if you like, you can simply type in the title of a favorite book into the BookAlike box and it will return a list of similarly leveled books with the same types of themes.