Independent (“Just Right”) Reading Descriptions
Level F
Characteristics of Level F Books
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Simple information texts, simple animal fantasy, realistic fiction, very
simple retellings of traditional tales, simple plays
Some texts with sequential information
Familiar content that expands beyond home, neighborhood, and school
Both simple and split dialogue, speaker usually assigned
Some longer stretches of dialogue
Variety in text structure beyond description (eg: compare/contrast)
Some longer sentences-more than ten words-with prepositional phrases,
adjectives, and dialogue
Variation in placement of subject, verb, adjectives, and adverbs
Some compound sentences conjoined by and
Many words with inflectional endings (-s, -es, -ed, -ing)
More details in the illustrations
Most texts have 3-8 lines of text per page
Periods, commas, quotation marks, exclamation points, questions marks, and
ellipses
Characteristics of Readers at Level F
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Beginning to build knowledge of the characteristics of different genres of
texts
Read stretches of both simple and split dialogue
Recognize a large number of high-frequency words quickly and automatically
Use letter-sound information to take apart simple, regular words as well as
some multisyllable words
Beginning to read fiction with more well-developed characters
Left-to-right directionality and voice-print match are completely automatic
Read without pointing and with appropriate rate, phrasing, intonation, and
stress
Self-corrects close to the point of error
Sample Texts
Level F
All-Star Examples: Biscuit Series (Capucilli), Noodles Series (Wilhelm), Itchy, Itchy
Chicken Pox (Maccarone), Teeny Tiny Woman (O’Connor), Soccer Game (Maccarone)
REMEMBER: You can sometimes find titles at your level or check the level of a book you already have
on Scholastic’s Book Wizard site. Look for the initials GRL (meaning Guided Reading Level) – this is the
level we use at school. www.scholastic.com/bookwizard
Nancy Giansante is a librarian who keeps a nice leveled book list at her website:
http://home.comcast.net/~ngiansante/
This site is searchable by grade level suggestions, titles, and author names.