Text Leveling System

Peanut Butter Sandwich

RDQ:	689	Max Word/Sent	38	Total Words	342		Diff Words	182
Lex	680	Ave Word/.Sent	21	Hi Freq occurs	160	46.8%	Hi freq	49	26.9%
AR	3.1	Long Sentences	81.3	Low Freq occurs	27	7.9%	Low freq	23	12.6%

I'll sing you a poem of a silly young king
Who played with the world at the end of a string,
But he only loved one single thing 
And that was just a peanut-butter sandwich.

His scepter and his royal gowns,
His regal throne and golden crowns
Were brown and sticky from the mounds
And drippings from each peanut-butter sandwich.

His subjects all were silly fools
For he had passed a royal rule
That all that they could learn in school
Was how to make a peanut-butter sandwich.

He would not eat his sovereign steak,
He scorned his soup and kingly cake,
And told his courtly cook to bake
An extra-sticky peanut-butter sandwich.

And then one day he took a bit
And started chewing with delight,
But found his mouth was stuck quite tight
From that last bite of peanut-butter sandwich.

His brother pulled, his sister pried,
The wizard pushed, his mother cried,
"My boy's committed suicide
From eating his last peanut-butter sandwich!"

The dentist came, and the royal doc.
The royal plumber banged and knocked,
But still those jaws stayed tightly locked.
Oh darn that sticky peanut-butter sandwich!

The carpenter, he tried with pliers,
The telephone man tried with wires,
The firemen, they tried with fire,
But couldn't melt that peanut-butter sandwich.

With ropes and pulleys, drills and coil,
With steam and lubricating oil 
For twenty years of tears and toil 
They fought that awful peanut-butter sandwich.

Then all his royal subjects came.
They hooked his jaws with grapplin' chains
And pulled both ways with might and main
Against that stubborn peanut-butter sandwich.

Each man and woman, girl and boy
Put down their ploughs and pots and toys
And pulled until kerack! Oh, joy 
They broke right through that peanut-butter sandwich

A puff of dust, a screech, a squeak 
The king's jaw opened with a creak.
And then in voice so faint and weak 
The first words that they heard him speak
Were, "How about a peanut-butter sandwich?"

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Dialog: Simple

Vocabulary: Few decoding/definition issues

Language: Colorful, figurative

Sentences: Many Long Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Some implications

Complexity: Several ideas - closely related

Concepts: Concrete/Simple Social

Author's purpose: Implied

Prior Knowledge: Familiarity

Sequence of Events: Chronological

Mature concepts: With common experiences or clear fantasy

Features

Character traits

Excessive # of characters

Simple problem/solution

Clear cause/effect

Simple Plot

Mood/tone

Rhyming

Unconventional punctuation

Topic

Cooperation

Village

*Community

Food

Kings/Queens

*Home Arts & Food

Low Frequency Words

committed	courtly	drippings	firemen	grapplin
kerack	kingly	lubricating	mounds	pliers
ploughs	plumber	poem	pried	pulleys
regal	royal	scepter	scorned	screech
sovereign	stubborn	suicide