I learned a new word yesterday: Lexiles. Lexiles, I've learned, involve assessing a student's reading level and assigning it a numeric value and assessing a book's reading level and assigning it a value. Then, like Garanimals*, teachers can match the student to a book.
I had to learn about Lexiles on the fast-track yesterday because I was answering a question about them over IM. The question was how to include a book's Lexile in the APA citation. That stumped me, it stumped my APA style guide, it stumped our Education librarian, Marcia Stockham. It's what we in the library biz call, yes, a stumper.
Marcia wondered if perhaps it wasn't in the citation that the Lexile needed to be provided, but in an annotation to the citation. But we're not sure. If you know the answer to this, could you please share with one and all via our comments below? Many thanks and good things showered down upon you.
A follow-up question wasn't a stumper, but I wasn't able to learn the answer before the person asking the question signed-off: how to find a book's Lexile. Marcia directed me to the database: Children's Literature Comprehensive Database. You can search by a variety of reading metrics, including Lexile, or search for a book and, in many cases, find its Lexile number. You can also do this search from the Lexile web site.
*Second thing I learned, how to spell Garanimals! Grranimals is wrong. I blame this prior ignorance on the fact that my parents did not love me enough to clothe me in Garanimals and instead forced me to match my own clothes. It was a hard-knock life.
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