Book Ladders Part III

Here it is, December already. Nearly half the school year has passed. In that time, we have made some progress with our classroom library/book ladder/text complexity project. Here's an update:

• Only 3 of the 6 of us chose this work as our professional goal this year. Two others wanted to dig into our new school-wide communication and grading system, Veracross. One other wanted to start a blog after going to a tech conference. I have to admit that I am disappointed. Without a departmental goal that all can work with, we have lost a lot of cohesion. 
• The grades 7 and 8 classroom libraries have been inventoried and leveled. Except for my own inventory, which I did myself, our Teaching Assistant tackled that job. There are holes and errors, which teachers are just now discovering, but it definitely saved hours of their time to have her do it.
• We downloaded the book lists from the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project site. Each genre or thematic list is arranged with titles from most simple to most complex within a leveling system, first the guided reading A-Z system, and then the Lexile system. 
• We highlighted the books we already have on that list (well, our TA did that part too, again with some holes and errors but still worth it).
• Since it is ordering time, we ordered books that fell between our current books on the list to fill out book ladders for next year.
• From the current and order list, we created a couple of book ladders that reflect the books in our classroom libraries.

I want to talk about that process a little bit. The TCRWP Fantasy book list is a long one that jumbles all kinds of fantasy together, from classic fantasy books like Eregon, to paranormal fantasy like City of Bones, to science fiction like Divergent. This made putting a book ladder together using just the TC list difficult and confusing, especially since kids tend to stick to one sub-genre for a while.

So on our Professional Development Day last week, the three of us sat down in my classroom to make a dystopian novel book ladder. This is a genre that many of our kids are reading right now, and we share a lot of the same titles on our shelves. It seemed a logical place to start.

Image found on olx.in website

With the classroom library inventory opened on our computers, we pulled as many science fiction dystopian books that we knew off the shelf and piled them on a table (there are probably more, but I haven't read all the books on my shelf yet!). Then we got sticky notes and we labeled the books based on our inventory's leveling information. Sometimes that level was a guided reading letter (T-Z), sometimes it was a Lexile score (usually between 650-850), and sometimes both.

Because we are hands-on, visual people, we lined up the books that had letter levels first, from easiest to hardest. Next, we slipped the Lexiled books into the line where they seemed to fit. Then we took a step back and frowned. Should the Shadow Children series (level Z) (e.g., Among the Hidden) be higher than Insurgent (Lexile 710) just because it has a dystopian theme? Considering length alone, the Divergent series seemed more challenging, as well as having a more complex plot and more complex characters. And what about Gone (Lexile 620)? It's a massively thick book, but not a complex storyline. Is there more to think about, infer, and discuss in Among the Hidden than Gone? We thought so, and put it behind the Shadow Children books.

In the end, we had a line-up we could live with. Next, we put together book labels for the backs of the books. These said: "If you liked this book, try (the next book in the series, or the next one up the ladder). If this book was not right for you, try (the next one down the ladder or one that is similar in level)." We felt this could give students more self-sufficiency as well as "save face" if they were reading low on the ladder.

Although we had a 3-hour chunk of time to work on this, we only got the one dystopian book ladder done. However, I think we needed to figure out what we were doing and how we would do it before we could get started. Now that we have done the one, we can go on and do others. I think I'll do the Social Justice book lists next, since we just finished that theme in our novel book club unit. Exciting!