Text Leveling System

Number the Stars

RDQ:	2217	Max Word/Sent	63	Total Words	3279		Diff Words	938
Lex	930	Ave Word/.Sent	10	Hi Freq occurs	2391	72.9%	Hi freq	402	42.9%
AR	5.3	Long Sentences	15	Low Freq occurs	212	6.5%	Low freq	160	17.1%

Why Are You Running?
"I'll race you to the corner, Ellen!" Annemarie 
adjusted the thick leather pack on her back so that 
her schoolbooks balanced evenly. "Ready?" She 
looked at her best friend.
Ellen made a face. "No," she said, laughing. "You 
know I can't beat you - my legs aren't as long. Can't 
we just walk, like civilized people?" She was a stocky 
ten-year-old, unlike lanky Annemarie.
"We have to practice for the athletic meet on 
Friday - I know I'm going to win the girls' race this 
week. I was second last week, but I've been practicing 
every day. Come on, Ellen," Annemarie pleaded, 
eyeing the distance to the next corner of the 
Copenhagen street. "Please?"
Ellen hesitated, then nodded and shifted her own 
rucksack of books against her shoulders. "Oh, all 
right. Ready," she said.
"Go!" shouted Annemarie, and the two girls were 
off, racing along the residential sidewalk. Annemarie's 
silvery blond hair flew behind her, and  
Ellen's dark pigtails bounced against her shoulders.]]
"Wait for me!" wailed little Kirsti, left behind, but 
the two older girls weren't listening.
Annemarie outdistanced her friend quickly, even 
though one of her shoes came untied as she sped 
along the street called Osterbrogade, past the small 
shops and cafés of her neighborhood here in northeast 
Copenhagen. Laughing, she skirted an elderly lady 
in black who carried a shopping bag made of string. A 
young woman pushing a baby in a carriage moved 
aside to make way. The corner was just ahead.
Annemarie looked up, panting, just as she reached 
the corner. Her laughter stopped. Her heart seemed 
to skip a beat.
"Halte! the soldier ordered in a stern voice.
The German word was as familiar as it was frightening. 
Annemarie had heard it often enough before, 
but it had never been directed at her until now.
Behind her, Ellen also slowed and stopped. Far 
back, little Kirsti was plodding along, her face in a 
pout because the girls hadn't waited for her.
Annemarie stared up. There were two of them. 
That meant two helmets, two sets of cold eyes 
glaring at her, and four tall shiny boots planted firmly 
on the sidewalk, blocking her path to home.
And it meant two rifles, gripped in the hands of the 
soldiers. She stared at the rifles first. Then, finally, 
she looked into the face of the soldier who had 
ordered her to halt.]]
"Why are you running?" the harsh voice asked.
His Danish was very poor. Three years, Annemarie 
thought with contempt. Three years they've been in 
our country, and still they can't speak our language.
"I was racing with my friend," she answered 
politely. "We have races at school every Friday, and 
I want to do well, so I -" Her voice trailed away, the 
sentence unfinished. Don't talk so much, she told 
herself. Just answer them, that's all.
She glanced back. Ellen was motionless on the 
sidewalk, a few yards behind her. Farther back, 
Kirsti was still sulking, and walking slowly toward the 
corner. Nearby, a woman had come to the doorway of 
a shop and was standing silently, watching.
One of the soldiers, the taller one, moved toward 
her. Annemarie recognized him as the one she and 
Ellen always called, in whispers, "the Giraffe" 
because of his height and the long neck that extended 
from his stiff collar. He and his partner were always 
on this corner.
He prodded the corner of her backpack with the 
stock of his rifle. Annemarie trembled. "What is in 
here?" he asked loudly. From the corner of her eye, 
she saw the shopkeeper move quietly back into the 
shadows of the doorway, out of sight.
"Schoolbooks," she answered truthfully.
"Are you a good student?" the soldier asked. He 
seemed to be sneering.]]
"Yes."
"What is your name?"
"Annemarie Johansen."
"Your friend - is she a good student, too?" He 
was looking beyond her, at Ellen, who hadn't moved.
Annemarie looked back, too, and saw that Ellen's 
face, usually rosy-cheeked, was pale, and her dark 
eyes were wide.
She nodded at the soldier. "Better than me," she 
said.
"What is her name?"
"Ellen."
"And who is this?" he asked, looking to Annemarie's 
side. Kirsti had appeared there suddenly, 
scowling at everyone.
"My little sister." She reached down for Kirsti's 
hand, but Kirsti, always stubborn, refused it and put 
her hands on her hips defiantly.
The soldier reached down and stroked her little 
sister's short, tangled curls. Stand still, Kirsti, Annemarie 
ordered silently, praying that somehow the 
obstinate five-year-old would receive the message.
But Kirsti reached up and pushed the soldier's 
hand away. "Don't," she said loudly.
Both soldiers began to laugh. They spoke to each 
other in rapid German that Annemarie couldn't 
understand.]] 
"She is pretty, like my own little girl," the tall one 
said in a more pleasant voice.
Annemarie tried to smile politely.
"Go home, all of you. Go study your schoolbooks. 
And don't run. You look like hoodlums when you 
run.
The two soldiers turned away. Quickly Annemarie 
reached down again and grabbed her sister's hand 
before Kirsti could resist. Hurrying the little girl 
along, she rounded the corner. In a moment Ellen 
was beside her. They walked quickly, not speaking, 
with Kirsti between them, toward the large apartment 
building where both families lived.
When they were almost home, Ellen whispered 
suddenly, "I was so scared."
"Me too," Annemarie whispered back.
As they turned to enter their building, both girls 
looked straight ahead, toward the door. They did it 
purposely so that they would not catch the eyes or 
the attention of two more soldiers, who stood with 
their guns on this corner as well. Kirsti scurried ahead 
of them through the door, chattering about the 
picture she was bringing home from kindergarten to 
show Mama. For Kirsti, the soldiers were simply part 
of the landscape, something that had always been 
there, on every corner, as unimportant as lampposts, 
throughout her remembered life.]] 
"Are you going to tell your mother?" Ellen asked Annemarie as they trudged together up the stairs. "I'm not. My mother would be upset."
"No, I won't, either. Mama would probably scold me for running on the street."
She said goodbye to Ellen on the second floor, where Ellen lived, and continued on to the third, practicing in her mind a cheerful greeting for her mother: a smile, a description of today's spelling test, in which she had done well.
But she was too late. Kirsti had gotten there first. "And he poked Annemarie's book bag with his gun, and then he grabbed my hair!" Kirsti was chattering as she took off her sweater in the center of the apartment living room. "But I wasn't scared. Annemarie was, and Ellen, too. But not me!"
Mrs. Johansen rose quickly from the chair by the window where she'd been sitting. Mrs. Rosen, Ellen's mother, was there, too, in the opposite chair. They'd been having coffee together, as they did many afternoons. Of course it wasn't really coffee, though the mothers still called it that: "having coffee." There had been no real coffee in Copenhagen since the beginning of the Nazi occupation. Not even any real tea. The mothers sipped at hot water flavored with herbs.
"Annemarie, what happened? What is Kirsti talking about?" her mother asked anxiously.]] 
"Where's Ellen?" Mrs. Rosen had a frightened look.
"Ellen's in your apartment. She didn't realize you were here," Annemarie explained. "Don't worry. It wasn't anything. It was the two soldiers who stand on the corner of Osterbrogade - you've seen them; you know the tall one with the long neck, the one who looks like a silly giraffe?" She told her mother and Mrs. Rosen of the incident, trying to make it sound humorous and unimportant. But their uneasy looks didn't change.
"I slapped his hand and shouted at him," Kirsti announced importantly.
"No, she didn't, Mama," Annemarie reassured her mother. "She's exaggerating, as she always does."
Mrs. Johansen moved to the window and looked down to the street below. The Copenhagen neighborhood was quiet; it looked the same as always: people coming and going from the shops, children at play, the soldiers on the corner.
She spoke in a low voice to Ellen's mother. "They must be edgy because of the latest Resistance incidents. Did you read in De Frie Danske about the bombings in Hillerod and Norrebro?"
Although she pretended to be absorbed in unpacking her schoolbooks, Annemarie listened, and she knew what her mother was referring to. De Frie Danske - The Free Danes - was an illegal newspaper;]] 
Peter Neilsen brought it to them occasionally, carefully folded and hidden among ordinary books and papers, and Mama always burned it after she and Papa had read it. But Annemarie heard Mama and Papa talk, sometimes at night, about the news they received that way: news of sabotage against the Nazis, bombs hidden and exploded in the factories that produced war materials, and industrial railroad lines damaged so that the goods couldn't be transported.
And she knew what Resistance meant. Papa had explained, when she overheard the word and asked. The Resistance fighters were Danish people - no one knew who, because they were very secret - who were determined to bring harm to the Nazis however they could. They damaged the German trucks and cars, and bombed their factories. They were very brave. Sometimes they were caught and killed.
"I must go and speak to Ellen," Mrs. Rosen said, moving toward the door. "You girls walk a different way to school tomorrow. Promise me, Annemarie. And Ellen will promise, too."
"We will, Mrs. Rosen. but what does it matter? There are German soldiers on every corner."
"They will remember your faces," Mrs. Rosen said, turning in the doorway to the hail. "It is important to be one of the crowd, always. Be one of]] 
many. Be sure that they never have reason to remember your face." She disappeared into the hall and closed the door behind her.
"He'll remember my face, Mama," Kirsti announced happily, "because he said I look like his little girl. He said I was pretty."
"If he has such a pretty little girl, why doesn't he go back to her like a good father?" Mrs. Johansen murmured, stroking Kirsti's cheek. "Why doesn't he go back to his own country?"
"Mama, is there anything to eat?" Annemarie asked, hoping to take her mother's mind away from the soldiers.
"Take some bread. And give a piece to your sister."
"With butter?" Kirsti asked hopefully. 
"No butter," her mother replied. "You know that."
Kirsti sighed as Annemarie went to the breadbox in the kitchen. "I wish I could have a cupcake," she said. "A big yellow cupcake, with pink frosting."
Her mother laughed. "For a little girl, you have a long memory," she told Kirsti. "There hasn't been any butter, or sugar for cupcakes, for a long time. A year, at least."
"When will there be cupcakes again?"
"When the war ends," Mrs. Johansen said. She]]
glanced through the window, down to the street corner where the soldiers stood, their faces impassive beneath the metal helmets. "When the soldiers leave."
Who Is the Man Who Rides Past?
"Tell me a story, Annemarie," begged Kirsti as she snuggled beside her sister in the big bed they shared. "Tell me a fairy tale."
Annemarie smiled and wrapped her arms around her little sister in the dark. All Danish children grew up familiar with fairy tales. Hans Christian Andersen, the most famous of the tale tellers, had been Danish himself.
"Do you want the one about the little mermaid?" That one had always been Annemarie's own favorite. But Kirsti said no. "Tell one that starts with a king and a queen. And they have a beautiful daughter." "All right. Once upon a time there was a king," Annemarie began.
"And a queen," whispered Kirsti. "Don't forget the queen."
"And a queen. They lived together in a wonderful palace, and -"
"Was the palace named Amalienborg?" Kirsti asked sleepily.
"Shhh. Don't keep interrupting or I'll never finish
the story. No, it wasn't Amalienborg. It was a pretend palace."
Annemarie talked on, making up a story of a king and queen and their beautiful daughter, Princess Kirsten; she sprinkled her tale with formal balls, fabulous gold-trimmed gowns, and feasts of pink frosted cupcakes, until Kirsti's deep, even breathing told her that her sister was sound asleep.
She stopped, waited for a moment, half expecting Kirsti to murmur "Then what happened?" But Kirsti was still. Annemarie's thoughts turned to the real king, Christian X, and the real palace, Amalienborg, where he lived, in the center of Copenhagen.
How the people of Denmark loved King Christian! He was not like fairy tale kings, who seemed to stand on balconies giving orders to subjects, or who sat on golden thrones demanding to be entertained and looking for suitable husbands for their daughters. King Christian was a real human being, a man with a serious, kind face. She had seen him often, when she was younger. Each morning, he had come from the palace on his horse, Jubilee, and ridden alone through the streets of Copenhagen, greeting his people. Sometimes, when Annemarie was a little girl, her older sister, Lise, had taken her to stand on the sidewalk so that she could wave to King Christian. Sometimes he had waved back to the two of them, and smiled. "Now you are special forever," Lise had
told her once, "because you have been greeted by a king."
Annemarie turned her head on the pillow and stared through the partly opened curtains of the window into the dim September night. Thinking of Use, her solemn, lovely sister, always made her sad.
So she turned her thoughts again to the king, who was still alive, as Use was not. She remembered a story that Papa had told her, shortly after the war began, shortly after Denmark had surrendered and the soldiers had moved in overnight to take their places on the corners.
One evening, Papa had told her that earlier he was on an errand near his office, standing on the corner waiting to cross the street, when King Christian came by on his morning ride. One of the German soldiers had turned, suddenly, and asked a question of a teenage boy nearby.
"Who is that man who rides past here every morning on his horse?" the German soldier had asked.
Papa said he had smiled to himself, amused that the German soldier did not know. He listened while the boy answered.
"He is our king," the boy told the soldier. "He is the King of Denmark."
"Where is his bodyguard?" the soldier had asked. "And do you know what the boy said?" Papa had
asked Annemarie. She was sitting on his lap. She was little, then, only seven years old. She shook her head, waiting to hear the answer.
"The boy looked right at the soldier, and he said, `All of Denmark is his bodyguard.' "
Annemarie had shivered. It sounded like a very brave answer. "Is it true, Papa?" she asked. "What the boy said?"
Papa thought for a moment. He always considered questions very carefully before he answered them. "Yes," he said at last. "It is true. Any Danish citizen would die for King Christian, to protect him."
"You too, Papa?" "Yes."
"And Mama?" "Mama too."
Annemarie shivered again. "Then I would too, Papa. If I had to."
They sat silently for a moment. From across the room, Mama watched them, Annemarie and Papa, and she smiled. Mama had been crocheting that evening three years ago: the lacy edging of a pillowcase, part of Use's trousseau. Her fingers moved rapidly, turning the thin white thread into an intricate narrow border. Use was a grownup girl of eighteen, then, about to be married to Peter Neilsen. When Use and Peter married, Mama said, Annemarie and Kirsti would have a brother for the very first time.
"Papa," Annemarie had said, finally, into the silence, "sometimes I wonder why the king wasn't able to protect us. Why didn't he fight the Nazis so that they wouldn't come into Denmark with their guns?"
Papa sighed. "We are such a tiny country," he said. "And they are such an enormous enemy. Our king was wise. He knew how few soldiers Denmark had. He knew that many, many Danish people would die if we fought."
"In Norway they fought," Annemarie pointed out. Papa nodded. "They fought very fiercely in Norway. They had those huge mountains for the Norwegian soldiers to hide in. Even so, Norway was crushed."
In her mind, Annemarie had pictured Norway as she remembered it from the map at school, up above Denmark. Norway was pink on the school map. She imagined the pink strip of Norway crushed by a fist.
"Are there German soldiers in Norway now, the same as here?"
"Yes," Papa said.
"In Holland, too," Mama added from across the room, "and Belgium and France."
"But not in Sweden!" Annemarie announced, proud that she knew so much about the world. Sweden was blue on the map, and she had seen Sweden, even though she had never been there.
Standing behind Uncle Henrik's house, north of Copenhagen, she had looked across the water - the part of the North Sea that was called the Kattegat - to the land on the other side. "That is Sweden you are seeing," Uncle Henrik had told her. "You are looking across to another country."
"That's true," Papa had said. "Sweden is still free."
And now, three years later, it was still true. But much else had changed. King Christian was getting old, and he had been badly injured last year in a fall from his horse, faithful old Jubilee, who had carried him around Copenhagen so many mornings. For days they thought he would die, and all of Denmark had mourned.
But he hadn't. King Christian X was still alive.
It was Lise who was not. It was her tall, beautiful sister who had died in an accident two weeks before her wedding. In the blue carved trunk in the corner of this bedroom - Annemarie could see its shape even in the dark - were folded Lise's pillowcases with their crocheted edges, her wedding dress with its hand-embroidered neckline, unworn, and the yellow dress that she had worn and danced in, with its full skirt flying, at the party celebrating her engagement to Peter.
Mama and Papa never spoke of Lise. They never opened the trunk. But Annemarie did, from time to time, when she was alone in the apartment; alone, she touched Lise's things gently, remembering her quiet, soft-spoken sister who had looked forward so to marriage and children of her own.
Redheaded Peter, her sister's fiancé, had not married anyone in the years since Lise's death. He had changed a great deal. Once he had been like a fun-loving older brother to Annemarie and Kirsti, teasing and tickling, always a source of foolishness and pranks. Now he still stopped by the apartment often, and his greetings to the girls were warm and smiling, but he was usually in a hurry, talking quickly to Mama and Papa about things Annemarie didn't understand. He no longer sang the nonsense songs that had once made Annemarie and Kirsti shriek with laughter. And he never lingered anymore.
Papa had changed, too. He seemed much older and very tired, defeated.
The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same.
"And they lived happily ever after," Annemarie recited, whispering into the dark, completing the tale for her sister, who slept beside her, one thumb in her mouth.]]

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Vocabulary: Some difficult words

Language: Many descriptive words

Sentences: Some Long/Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Several Implications

Complexity: Many different ideas

Concepts: Abstract/Complex Social

Chapters

Headings

Author's purpose: Obvious

Features

Character traits

Integral Setting - Historical

Simple Plot

Difficult names

Foreign words

Topic

*History

Soldiers

Danger

War

*Family & Friends

*Global Issues

Prejudice

Low Frequency Words

absorbed	adjusted	amalienborg	amused	announced
anxiously	balconies	bombings	cafés	carriage
cheeked	citizen	civilized	contempt	crocheted
crocheting	curls	curtains	danes	danish
danske	defiantly	determined	edges	edging
edgy	elderly	embroidered	engagement	errand
exaggerating	eyeing	fabulous	factories	familiar
fiancé	fiercely	formal	frie	frightening
frosted	german	glaring	gripped	halt
halte	harsh	height	henrik	henrik's
herbs	hesitated	hoodlums	hoping	humorous
illegal	imagined	impassive	importantly	incident
incidents	injured	interrupting	intricate	jubilee
kattegat	kindergarten	lacy	lampposts	landscape
language	lanky	laughter	lingered	lise
lise's	marriage	materials	motionless	mourned
murmur	murmured	nazi	nazis	neckline
neighborhood	northeast	norway	norwegian	obstinate
occasionally	opposite	ordinary	osterbrogade	outdistanced
overheard	overnight	partner	pictured	pillowcases
pleaded	pleasant	plodding	practicing	prodded
purposely	realize	reassured	recited	recognized
redheaded	referring	refused	residential	resist
resistance	ridden	rifles	rosen	rosy
rounded	rucksack	sabotage	schoolbooks	scowling
scurried	shared	shopkeeper	shortly	shriek
silvery	skirted	sleepily	sneering	soldier
soldier's	solemn	source	stern	stock
stocky	stubborn	suitable	sulking	surrendered
sweater	sweden	tangled	thread	thrones
throughout	transported	trousseau	trudged	truthfully
unfinished	unimportant	unworn	whispers	younger