Leveling Books

This coming school year, I will be implementing Reader's Workshop in my classroom.  Our District is moving towards the reader's workshop/writer's workshop model of teaching as part of our balanced literacy program. I implemented writer's workshop last year, but reader's workshop will be new this year.  In order to get ready for this change, I decided to take home every somewhat-leveled book in my classroom this summer to really level according to guided reading levels. I figured summer would be the best time, right? This has not been an easy task. Finding the levels of each book has been tricky to say the least.  As I am winding down my leveling job (only 4 more buckets to go) I thought maybe there is someone else out there who could benefit from some of what I have learned:

1) I Bought a Fountas and Pinnell leveled book website membership.  http://www.fountasandpinnellleveledbooks.com  It is $25.00 for a year and has been helpful, but....

2) Their "old" book that I have has been most helpful - I guess I must have "old" books

http://www.amazon.com/Matching-Books-Readers-Leveled-Reading/dp/0325001936

3) Also somewhat helpful is the Scholastic Book Wizard, but many books I have seem to come up with no guided reading level.  http://www.scholastic.com/bookwizard/

4) Thus I have been typing in the publisher and series i.e. Newbridge Discovery links, and getting all the titles and levels from the publishers sight. This even seems to work for books via Scholastic - strange but true

5) I have also found that typing "guided reading level for (insert name of book here)" into Google sometimes yields results.  

The last thing I struggled with was what criteria to use to level the books if you just can't find the guided reading level out there anywhere (thus the last 4 buckets I have to work on)

Today I found something on Mrs. Wills Kindergarten blog that was not meant for this purpose, but will be most helpful. http://www.mrswillskindergarten.com

The date of her post was June 20 2013, as I am not sure the above link will take you directly to the correct post.  She has leveled reading brochures for parents posted as a freebie.  In the brochures, she describes the different levels in a way that I find helpful for leveling my own books.  

I also found cute labels for my book buckets and books (I didn't actually use the  book labels.)  I found that after many years stickers seem to fall off, so I put a sticker dot on the front of each book with the level and wrote the level on the back in case the sticker fell off. The labels are from Ladybug's Teacher Files http://www.ladybugsteacherfiles.com/2011/03/leveled-bin-and-book-labels-letters-to.html

That's it in a nutshell.  Hopefully this is beneficial to someone else too.