Titles and levels can be guides as teachers, teacher leaders, and university trainers engage in the daily decisions of selecting books for students participating in Reading Recovery. This is why the use of the Book List, without Reading Recovery training and ongoing professional development, is unlikely to result in accelerated progress for children receiving tutoring. Moreover, the levels used by Reading Recovery are designed especially for children who are finding reading acquisition most difficult, and the fine gradient of difficulty is less useful for the rich primary classroom program. What the Levels Mean Books on the Reading Recovery Book List 2000 are organized along a continuum of 20 levels, ranging in complexity from simple texts to stories similar to those found in first and beginning second grade readers.
Levels are only approximate indicators of text difficulty and are intended to serve as a guide.
A child's prior experience, ability to employ strategies, and the richness of a story introduction will affect each child's success in reading the same texts. The Reading Recovery Book List is a compilation of titles that may be in use at Reading Recovery sites throughout North America. Books on the list represent all titles that have been leveled by Reading Recovery educators and recommended for use in Reading Recovery. The Book List 2000 represents countless hours of volunteer work by approximately one hundred trainers, teacher leaders, and teachers who engaged in an intensive review process that included initial review of several thousand books and field-testing of these books with Reading Recovery children. The Reading Recovery educators who supported the process of review and field-testing represented geographic, language and cultural diversity, with reviewers working primarily out of Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, and Massachusetts sites.