Parent Resources

Understanding text Levels

Guided Reading is an assessment framework put together by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell after years, and years and then more years of reading research. In short they determined, "...what the reader needs to be able to do at each level to read with accuracy, understanding, and fluency."

Guided Reading levels include many factors to determine appropriateness. This includes illustration support, layout of the book, length of the book, the use of dialogue, vocabulary, the use of characters, plot, and sentence structure. There are more elements included in determining a book's Guided Reading level - but you can already see this is a more complete picture of looking at a book to determine its appropriateness.

The Guided Reading levels is a letter based system - A to Z. ​And likely, your kid's classroom teacher is assessing your child using this framework. So they know a lettered level that your child is on and that determines if they are on-level or not.

The goal, is to match the level the reader is reading at to a book that is at the same level or slightly higher. So, if your child is reading at a Level M, you'd want to offer book choices in the Level M and N range. (The Reading Parent, 2016)

Examples of text Levels