So What are Levelled Books Anyway?
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So what are levelled books anyway, and why were we using them in the first place?
To understand levelled books, we need to start with Balanced Literacy.
Balanced Literacy was an approach to literacy instruction that sought to “balance” phonics instruction with “whole language” instruction (which focused on exposing students to rich literacy experiences, whole words, and context).
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Common activities that were part of Balanced Literacy Instruction included:
- Read Aloud
- Shared Reading
- Guided Reading
- Word Study
- Modelled/Shared Writing
- Interactive Writing
- Guided Writing
- Writer’s Workshop
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One of the philosophies behind Balanced Literacy was that young readers are pattern detectors rather than rule followers. Systematic instruction of decoding and encoding conventions (based on a set Scope and Sequence) was not encouraged. The Balanced Literacy philosophy was that students would learn through experience and exposure to a wide variety of texts.
This is where levelled books come in.
So what exactly are they, and how were they crafted?
There are a ton of definitions you can find for levelled books, partially because every publisher seems to have a different formula for creating them. The one that rings the most true for me is from Reading Universe:
“Leveled text – text that has been assigned a reading level based on various factors: vocabulary, number of different words, support from context, support from pictures, page layout. Leveled texts contain high-frequency words and other words that may not be decodable.”
I like this definition because it refers to “various factors”, alluding to the “variation” that could always be seen in leveled books from one publisher to another. For example, the “high-frequency words” included in books from one publisher might be different from those used in books from another publisher.
Because levelled books include words that may not be decodable (i.e., contain graphemes/phonemes/morphemes that haven’t explicitly been taught), students were supported by cues in different domains:
- Meaning: what would make sense in the context of the story
- Structure: what would make sense from a grammatical perspective
- Visual: what would make sense based on the letters in the words
It’s understandable why levelled books were so popular. Because the choice of which “high-frequency” words to include was totally up to the publisher, and any “content” words could be included as long as there were pictures to support, the sky was the limit as to what you could write about. Authors could create engaging stories with interesting characters and plots. The books read smoothly with natural language structures and were meaning-driven.
Here is a prime example. The open spread shown here is from a Level 3 Book called “The Lazy Pig”. The gist of this book is that the sun is up, and all the animals on the farm are up – except for the pig. The pig does not want to get up (hence the definition of “lazy”) until the farmer arrives with its breakfast.
The Lazy Pig, PM Starters
This page is a great demonstration of levelled books because it includes the complex word “cock-a-doodle-doo.” This is a tricky word to decode. Students are not, however, expected to decode it. They are expected to use a “meaning cue” (e.g., that it is a rooster, and the sun is up, so it must be saying “cock-a-doodle-doo”, which is what roosters say in the morning).
Here lies the biggest issue with using levelled books. Successful reading relies on a student’s background knowledge. While a “book walk” was part of a guided reading lesson to help “set the scene” of the book, it wasn’t enough to support students who had never experienced the main topic of a book (e.g., a trip to a fair, fishing in a river, or a visit to a farm). Two of the main cues used (background knowledge and a solid understanding of grammar) rely on students having a wealth of life experience and rich exposure to the English language.
When I look back on my time in the classroom, I can see now why some of my students struggled with these books. I strongly believed that teaching letter/sound associations was important, and I did so every day. When I gave my students books, however, they were rarely able to use this knowledge to support their reading because the books contained many words they could not sound out using what I had taught them.
Here is another example of an early levelled reader.
At the Zoo, The King School Series
Based on the letter/sound associations that I had taught my students, “not” is the only decodable word on that page. Students would need to know “look” and “the” (likely as sight words), use the picture to help with “elephants”, and then hopefully use their grammar understanding to fill in “are” (seeing as there is more than one elephant). The final word “alone” would also be tricky – likely picked up through a book walk, where previous pictures showed other animals that were “not alone”.
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When I began my Orton-Gillingham training, I learned about decodable books and the value of following a Scope and Sequence for instruction and instructional resources. At this point, I began to look at levelled books differently. Here are a few of my key takeaways:
- Levelled books as a whole are quite varied. Different publishers have different takes on which high-frequency words to include, and “content” words vary greatly depending on book topic.
- Levelled books can be quite engaging. The fact that their vocabulary is not constrained by a Scope and Sequence can lead to books with interesting characters and adventures.
- Students do best with levelled books if they have a wide range of world knowledge, a strong vocabulary, and a solid understanding of how to make English “sound” right (in terms of being able to predict what word might come next from a grammar lens).
- Students without this strong vocabulary, sense of grammar, and world knowledge tend to struggle. Two of the “cues” (meaning and structure) are harder to access. On top of this, the third “cue”, which is using the visual information on the page to sound out words, is also inaccessible because often the unknown words are challenging to decode and include concepts that are far beyond what has been taught in the classroom.
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So what do we do with them?
With all this in mind, you might question what we do with the levelled books in our school and with those book rooms? I get asked this regularly. I’ll leave you with a few ideas.
First, levelled books are just books. Like all books in our school systems, they should be regularly vetted to ensure they are still appropriate for our student population. Levelled books that are outdated, uninteresting, and/or patterned should be removed.
Second, as we learn more about Scope and Sequences and systematic instruction, we begin to look at all books through that lens. There is nothing inherently wrong with a levelled book if it is engaging and the topic is appropriate for a student. We need to revisit these books in greater depth to determine where they fit within our Scope and Sequence. Certainly, some of the early levelled books are unlikely to be appropriate for students. Through the lens of systematic instruction, they likely include concepts that will only be taught much later in a Scope and Sequence (consider “cock-a-doodle-doo”). By the time students can decode this, they will likely no longer be interested in a short book such as “The Lazy Pig”.
As we move up in levels, though, there will come a point where books become interesting for students, and upon review, we discover that we have taught most of the concepts in the book. As a final example, I present to you a page from “Lost in the Jungle”.
As of Lesson 91 of UFLI Foundations, every word (including were, climbed, and flew) would be decodable.