Understanding Leveled Text

I attended a course about Guided reading  which I found to be interesting. It was a good reminder of a lot of things I already knew but it is good to hear it again. The main message from this course was that we need to teach children to be balanced readers, rather than just good at decoding. Comprehension is really important.


The course was referencing the PM readers (my favourites) that we use at school. I hadn’t realised that so much thought and consideration goes into each written text. I learnt that the first contraction the children will meet in a PM reader is in Level 11 ( I’ve- I have). In a well leveled text, nothing is left to chance. They count the amount of words and the number of times that certain high frequency and interest words are allowed to be used in a text, the number of words and lines on each page is important and well considered - who knew??


We were taught that it is important to have more of an understanding of the levels within the structure of PM’s rather than just saying that a level 4 is harder than a level 5 text. The reason why we used leveled text is because as children learn to read, most will become a balanced reader. What is a balanced reader? A balanced reader can decode, correctly say words on the page- pull words apart and put words back together. They will be fluent and have correct phrasing, and they will have a good understanding of what they have read.


I found it interesting to note that fluency and phrasing is leveled just as much as the decoding is leveled. Decoding is the easy part to teach and this is the part that parents of the children we teach see as most important. Often as children move through the levels, we learn that children can decode but can’t answer anything about what they have read.


When a child is 8 years old, they should be decoding 80 words per minute, a 10 year old- 100 words per minute and a 12 year old 120 words per minute.


The early levels are strongly developed for CAPS. There is consistent placement of print and the number of high frequency words are slowly increased as you move through the levels. The return sweep is introduced in level 2 and always for a new sentence. Every level has a repetition rate and new words will be repeated a certain number of times. Between each level, a new word is introduced -1 word in 20.


The phrasing and fluency is carefully planned. Level 15 books have all the line breaks uneven and you will notice conjunctions at the beginning of the line as oppose to Level 30 has very even line breaks and children have to read more than one idea so they are reading compound sentences. Level 20 books no longer have conjunctions at the beginning of the line - they are in the middle and by the time we reach level 30 conjunctions are replaced with commas. I have a new respect for the PM authors.

In order to become a balanced reader, children need to be exposed to a lot of different books including narrative, information, explanation etc. Children need to be balanced readers at every level and leveled texts were developed to produce balanced readers. We as teachers of reading need to be careful that we are considering the fact that children need to be balanced readers at every level and not create a race to get to a certain level as fast as we can. We also need to consider the interest level of our readers and the reading age needs to match this. It is easy as teachers to want to race children ahead and this is a timely reminder to slow the process and ensure the children are reading where they should be- not where we would like them to be.