What are Reading Levels?
I am sure that you have heard your child's teacher talk about their reading level, but what does this mean exactly?
Reading levels are way to pair your child’s reading ability with books they can successfully read and understand.
Reading levels help teachers measure a child’s reading progress. If your child is primarily reading books at or just above their determined reading level, they are more likely to find reading enjoyable and be encouraged to read voraciously. The opposite is true for readers who attempt to read a book that is far beyond their ability. More often than not, this frustration creates an overall dislike of reading and books.
How Do We Assess Reading Levels?
Students are assessed at a minimum of 3 times per year, but the teacher is constantly doing on-the-go assessments as students are engaged in reading workshop. By listening to the students read, asking questions and observing their fix-up strategies, the teacher can get a reading of what the child is doing well and what areas the need to set goals for improvement.
What do the Letters mean?
Guided reading levels are based on the reading levels system developed by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Because we use Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project units of study for reading, these levels also correlate with the instructional reading levels for the students. This system classifies reading levels alphabetically from A to Z. There are benchmarks for the beginning, middle and end of each grade.
- Sentence length
- Word repetition
- Sentence complexity
- Total word count
- Number of different words
- Inclusion of supportive illustrations
- Amount of high-frequency (or most common) words
