5 things you have to know about Lexile plus a FREEBIEE

01 April 2016

        Differentiating is a HUGE passion of mine.  I try my very best to make sure each and every one of my students has materials and recourses suitable for them.  Often times we see children not working, not staying on task, and/or having a negative attitude towards school.  Most often than not, this is because the child does not have appropriate tasks to be doing. Whether the work be to difficult or too easy, either way, we MUST place materials that are engaging, enriching, and appropriate for the child as an individual and not the class as a whole.   

        Recently, New Baden Elementary has made a school goal, with lexile scores.  You might be asking yourself right now what are lexile scores!?  -keep reading-  Because of this new goal and our lack of knowledge on lexile scores, our wonderful administrators hired a lexile representative to come to our school and help us dig deeper into these scores and the meaning of lexile.  My most favorite quote of the day was....
This quote just clicked the whole meaning of lexile for me!  The age of the student has nothing to do with the level of books a child should be reading.  Look for books and recourses for  the children as individuals instead of looking for books that are appropriate for the child to be reading at that grade level.   

I have summed up our 8 hour day into 5 essential components to understanding and using lexile scores.

Okay to brief description to lexile:  A measuring tool used to see a child's reading ability. With this being said, lexie is a measuring tool.  It is NOT an assessment.  Our lexile representative put this in great perspective for us.  We use several different assessment tools to test children on their reading abilities.  Lexile is not one of them.  Lexile is a measuring system, much like the metric system or fahrenheit and celsius.      

A child is given a lexile score, however, the child DOES NOT have to stick with books with just that number.  For a child to have independent success with a book, they can chose materials that are 100 points below their score, as well as 50 points above their score.  This allows a bigger selection when picking out "good fit books."  This also allows the child to understand and enjoy what they are reading!
I absolutely loved this part!! Our basal books are are on a lexile roller coster! A text book company puts together stories they see fit for a specific grade level.  AFTERWARDS they approach lexile to link a lexile score to each story. LASTLY, the textbook company networks their textbooks to schools and tries to sell their book.  With that being said, they have the teachers in mind LAST!  For example, we may start off with a higher story, move to a lower story, move to now an even lower level story, then go up a little higher, go back down, SHOOT way up high again, little lower, and so on and so on.    Instead of putting our students on a roller coster we want to gradually increase the lexile level.  

Say it is February in a second grade classroom.  Your basal book has a story lexiled at 500L to be read for that week.  Your kids are doing GREAT with it.  You are high on life and pumped to be sending them to 3rd grade reading successfully at a 500L.  Well the next week your story is leveled at a 150L.  Your kids once again doing great.  The following week our basal shoots us a story at 500L again.  You are thinking they are GOLDEN.  ERRR WRONG!  Most likely your students are going to be struggling with this story because they just finished a book that was 150L.  

There are SOO many FREE lexiled reading recourses out there for you to use!  Here is a list of a few web sites I learned about or use!
Use lexile.com as a free resource as well!  If you have a book and you don't know the lexile level analyze it yourself!  use these EASY steps to lexile any book you need!


I also use this analyzer to lexile my own passages!! Check out my tpt store for various lexiled passages!  


Click the link to get  my Lexiled Earth Day Passages!! For the whole package check out our tpt store!








0 comments:

Post a Comment

Powered by Blogger.
Back to Top