Text Leveling System

The Bunyans

RDQ:	1336	Max Word/Sent	33	Total Words	1195		Diff Words	520
Lex	800	Ave Word/.Sent	15	Hi Freq occurs	716	59.9%	Hi freq	190	36.5%
AR	4.1	Long Sentences	24.1	Low Freq occurs	100	8.4%	Low freq	84	16.2%

One day when Paul Bunyan
was out clearing a road through
the forests of Kentucky, a great pounding began to shake the
earth.  Looking around, Paul discovered an enormous hole in the side of
a hill. The lumberjack pulled up an acre of dry cane and fashioned a 
torch to light his way.
Paul climbed inside the hole and followed the sound underground 
for miles, until he came to a large cavern glistening with crystals. By the
flickering light of his torch, he saw a gigantic woman banging a behemoth
pickax against a wall.
It was love at first sight.]]
""I'm Carrie McIntie,"" the gigantic woman said. ""I was sitting on
the hill when my lucky wishbone fell down a crack into the earth.
I've been digging all day trying to find it.""
With a grin on his face as wide as the Missouri River, Paul
reached into his shirt pocket. ""I've got one too,"" he said, pulling
out his lucky wishbone. ""Marry me, Carrie, and we'll share mine.""]]
Carrie agreed, and their wedding invitations were mailed out
right away.
The invitation was so large, only one needed to be sent to
each state. Everyone could read them for miles!
The invitations said: You are cordially invited to the mammoth
wedding of Paul Bunyan and Carrie McIntie. The couple were
married in the enormous crystal chamber that Carrie had carved,
and after the ceremony, folks began to call it ""Mammoth Cave.""
The giantess had dug more than two hundred miles, making it
the longest cave in the world, so the name fit perfectly.]]
Paul and Carrie settled down on a farm in Maine, and soon there
were two new Bunyans. While Pa Bunyan traveled with his logging crew,]]
Ma Bunyan worked the farm and cared for their jumbo boy, named Little
Jean, and their gigantic girl, named Teeny.]]
One morning when Pa Bunyan was home between jobs, Ma
Bunyan cooked up a hearty breakfast of pancakes and syrup.
Teeny was wrestling with her big purple puma named Slink and
accidently dumped a silo of syrup on her head. Teeny's hair was
so sweet, bears crawled into it and burrowed deep in her curls.
Try as they might, Pa and Ma Bunyan couldn't wash them out.
""We'll need a forceful shower of water to get rid of those
varmints!"" Ma Bunyan declared.]]
Pa Bunyan had an idea. He placed his daughter on Babe, and he let
them to the Niagara River in Canada. The gargantuan father scooped out a 
huge hole in the middle of the riverbed. As the great river roared down into
that deep hole, Teeny cried out in delight. ""Niagara falls!"" Teeny showered in
the waterfall, and the pesky bears were washed downstream.]]
When Little Jean was five, he wanted to work too, so he followed his pa
out to his logging camp in Montana. Thinking his son was too young to do much
of anything, Paul set Little Jean down in a barren canyon in Utah to play for
the day. When the lumberjack went to fetch him, he couldn't believe his eyes.
Little Jean had carved the canyon into a wonderland of fanciful shapes.
Pa Bunyan got tongue-tied and said. ""That's a might brice nanyon, coy.""
I mean a mighty nice canyon, boy!"" Somehow part of the mix-up stuck.
To this day the canyon is known as Bryce Canyon.]]
After all that sculpting, Little Jean's shoes were full of sand. Pa knew
Ma Bunyan wouldn't want her clean floors dirtied up, so he told Little Jean
to sit down and empty out his shoes.
The sand from Little Jean's shoes blew away on the eastern wind and
settled down a state away. It covered a valley ten miles long, making sand
dunes eight hundred feet high. Everyone knows that's how the Great Sand
Dunes of Colorado came to be.]]
One summer, Little Jean and Teeny wanted to go to the beach.
Ma Bunyan told them to follow a river to the ocean. But all the rivers
flowed west back then, so they missed the Atlantic Ocean and ended 
up on the other side of the country instead.
Ma Bunyan tracked them out to the Pacific Ocean, where she]]
found Teeny riding the backs of two blue whales and Little Jean
carved out fifty zigzag miles of the California coast.
When Ma Bunyan saw what her son had done, she exclaimed,
""What's the big idea, sir!?"" From that time on, the scenic area was
known as Big Sur.]]
Ma Bunyan knew she had to put up a barrier to remind her children not
to wander off too far. So, on the way home, everyone pitched in and built the
Rocky Mountains. Teeny gathered up and sorted out all the rivers, letting 
some flow east and others west. After that, the children had no trouble
following the eastern rivers down to the Atlantic Ocean. And when they
wanted to go out exploring, Ma Bunyan would call out, ""Now don't cross
the Continental Divide, children!""]]
The best thing about camping is sleeping outdoors, and
the worst thing is not having enough hot water. That's why the
Bunyans always camped in Wyoming. By the time their camping
years were over, Ma Bunyan had poked more than three hundred
holes in the ground with her pickax and released tons of hot water
from geysers. But Ma got tired of poking so many holes, so she
made a geyser that blew every hour on the hour. After that, there
was a steady supply of hot water to keep the giants' clothes and
dishes sparkling clean.
Teeny named the geyser Old Faithful, and to this day, Old
Faithful still blows its top every hour in Yellowstone National Park.]]
As our great country grew up, so did the Bunyan children. When 
the kids left home, Ma and Pa Bunyan retired to a wilderness area,
where they still live happily.]]
Teeny hitched a ride on a whale over to England and became a famous
fashion designer. Her colorful skirts made from air balloons and her breezy
blouses cut from ship sails were the sensation at the first World's Fair in London.]]
Little Jean traveled to Venice, Italy, where he studied astronomy and art.
Every day, the gondoliers would take their passengers down the Grand Canal
to watch the giant artist chiseling his marble sculptures.]]
After graduation, Little Jean decided to explore new lands, as
his parents had done. So he took two great jumps and one flying 
leap and bounded up into outer space.
In 1976, the year of our country's bicentennial, a spacecraft
sent by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was
on a mission to study Mars. The spacecraft was named Viking I,
and it took many photographs of the surface of the planet. One
mysterious photo looked like a face carved out of colossal rock.
Some say the photograph is not a face, but an illusion caused
by light and shadow on the rock. Others think the famous
""Martian face"" is just the spitting image of Little Jean Bunyan. If
that's so, who knows what he's up to on the other planets.]]
Only time will tell!]]

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: Some support

Inferences: Some implications

Dialog: Broken dialogue

Vocabulary: Many difficult words

Language: Colorful, figurative

Sentences: Many Long Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Several Implications

Complexity: Several unrelated ideas

Concept: Fanciful

Features

Character traits

Simple Plot

Parody

Topic

Size

Changes

Giants

*History

American History

*Geography

*Fictional Ideas/Charac

*Family & Friends

Low Frequency Words

acre	administration	aeronautics	astronomy	barren
barrier	behemoth	bicentennial	burrowed	cavern
ceremony	chiseling	colossal	continental	cordially
coy	curls	designer	dirtied	dunes
eastern	exploring	fanciful	fashion	fashioned
flickering	forceful	gargantuan	geyser	geysers
giantess	gigantic	glistening	gondoliers	graduation
hearty	illusion	image	invitation	invitations
jean's	jumbo	kentucky	logging	mammoth
martian	mcintie	mission	missouri	montana
mysterious	nanyon	national	niagara	pacific
passengers	photograph	photographs	pickax	puma
retired	riverbed	scenic	sculpting	sculptures
sensation	shower	showered	silo	slink
spacecraft	sparkling	studied	sur	syrup
teeny's	torch	varmints	venice	viking
wander	wonderland	wrestling	yellowstone