Teacher Book Wizard at Scholastic.com

As a teacher I find that while leveled libraries are a key element of any reading program, they can be difficult to accurately put together and maintain. In the past, I used the hard copy Fountas and Pinnell Leveled Book List. This list, while comprehensive, does not have texts that have been published since 2009. It is also time consuming to search through its 683 pages looking for a text or texts. Not to mention it's $47 price tag. This past year, I discovered the Fountas and Pinnell leveled books website. This was an improvement over the hard copy text since you could use a search engine to find a text in the database which saved time, however the price tag was roughly $1 per login. Not the best solution ever.

Well, hold the phone. The Teacher Book Wizard at Scholastic.com is a search engine which links to a database with the level information for over 50,000 texts. You can find out the Grade Level Equivalent, Lexile Measure, Guided Reading, or DRA level of a text, and you can also search for texts that are about a similar subject and/or on a similar reading level. That means that if I have a student who loves Key to the Treasure by Peggy Parish, I can search for similar books that are on his guided reading level. Alternatively, if I have another student who would love to read Key to the Treasure but hasn't reached that reading level yet, I can search for books that are similar but on a lower guided reading level as well. In addition, there is a forum for teachers to post text sets and reading lists of books they enjoy and read the posts that other teachers have put up.

But, wait, there's more! All of this comes to you for the low, low price of...FREE. That's right - FREE. You can't beat that. I totally recommend that you go and check it out today!