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Carol and others: As a segue: my background is a Reading Specialist, and based on that background, I elected to shelve my elementary "Easy" books by reading levels first, then by the first letter of the author's last name within those sections. We color coded everything. i.e. Wordless or "pre-reading" books had a bright pink label and the first letter of the authors last name displayed on the top edge/centered front of the books. Students at this age are just beginning letter recognition, so the combination of color and 1st letter seemed the ideal. Emergent reading level books we called L1 and were bright lime green with the first letter... The fact that picture books are often written at a level 5, combined with limited time for students to choose books, and with my personal philosophy that students will be more likely to grow to love reading if they are attempting books with which they have reading success, Leveling those very primary books was the logical choice for me. I designed book bins and had the high school wood working class build six of them to accommodate the targeted books, thus highlighting the colorful fronts of the books and helping students begin to unconsciously begin to build a base of prediction and choosing schema. I want to stress - Leveling was ONLY for the pre-reading, emergent and transitional reader. All chapter books, Picture books written at level 5 and beyond and non-picture books were shelved in the traditional approved manner. By third grade, the majority of our students had transitioned to these areas of the library media center. Most (appx. 90%) of the teachers, all of the students and the parents who bothered to ask reported a preference for our leveled solution over the traditional. I'm sure many of you are asking yourselves how we decided on which level the books should be placed, and that was a huge job that took a very long time. My wonderful assistant and series of dedicated volunteers worked on this over two years! First, we pulled all the "I Can Read" type books and labeled them based on whatever the commercial publishers had used. Next, because we were an AR school we pulled all the books for which we had AR quizzes (I know there is a lot of controversy surrounding the leveling - but this is what we decided was better than what we had before). Thirdly, we used a variety of other means: Some volunteers used the AR site to look up levels for books that had quizzes available, but we didn't own; if the quiz wasn't available, we looked on assorted book vendors sites for levels (Mackin, Econoclad, etc...), if there was no level or the book was not found they put it aside for me to level. Finally, the books that made it into my list I either used the "Quick" Flesch-Kincaid 300 word leveling option in Word, or the traditional leveling techniques I learned in college. Brook -- Brook Berg, Media Specialist Detroit Lakes Middle School 500 11th Ave. Detroit Lakes, MN 56501 218-847-9228 bberg@detlakes.k12.mn.us =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=- All LM_NET postings are protected by copyright law. To change your LM_NET status, e-mail to: listserv@listserv.syr.edu In the message write EITHER: 1) SIGNOFF LM_NET 2) SET LM_NET NOMAIL 3) SET LM_NET MAIL 4) SET LM_NET DIGEST * Allow for confirmation. LM_NET Help & Information: http://ericir.syr.edu/lm_net/ Archive: http://askeric.org/Virtual/Listserv_Archives/LM_NET.shtml LM_NET Select/EL-Announce: http://www.cuenet.com/archive/el-announce/ LM_NET Supporters: http://ericir.syr.edu/lm_net/ven.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-