Text Leveling System

Introducing Planet Earth

RDQ:	415	Max Word/Sent	18	Total Words	508		Diff Words	224
Lex	610	Ave Word/.Sent	9	Hi Freq occurs	283	55.7%	Hi freq	75	33.5%
AR	2.5	Long Sentences	0	Low Freq occurs	36	7.1%	Low freq	25	11.2%

Let me introduce myself. I am Planet Earth. I am the luckiest planet in our solar system. I can support life!
Look at Mercury so close to the sun. Hot, hot, hot. Even one of my desert rats could not live in that heat!
Poor, cold Pluto sits so far from the sun. Brrrr. How would you like to be a frozen Popsicle Planet? Not me.
I have all the things life needs-air, water, and land.
I have four oceans and seven huge pieces of land called continents. On land, I even have lakes and rivers filled with fresh water that plants and animals need.
I spin like a top, so that all living things have day and night. People call this rotating.
Because I am round like a ball, sunlight hits me unevenly. This makes parts of me hot and parts of me cold. 
My fat belly gets the most direct sunlight, so it is hottest along my belt. This area is called the equator. My North and South Poles get the least direct sunlight. The sun's rays are weaker here than at my equator. These areas are my coldest.  
Whether it's hot, cold, or in between, creatures live all over me.
People live on all my continents; a few even live around the South Pole in Antarctica. Most people live in my milder parts where they can build homes and grow crops. 
People travel all over my planet. Long ago, people got lost when sailing across my oceans. They needed a way to identify locations. So they invented a global grid, or lines that cross each other to form points anywhere on Earth. The lines that run north and south are longitude lines. The lines running east and west are latitude lines. This grid tells people where they are.
Oh, I almost forgot. I am tilted, too. As I travel around the sun during my year-long trip, I stay in my tilt. Sometimes I tilt toward the sun, and sometimes away from it.
My tilt creates seasons. In January, my top half, or northern half, is tilted away from the sun. That's winter when children in the northern half go sledding. At the same time, the southern half is pointed toward the sun. It's summer there.
When I get halfway around the sun and it's July, I'm still tilted. But this time, my northern half is tilted toward the sun, and it's summer. My southern half is pointed away from the sun, and it's winter there.
I am a fair planet. I give each of my halves seasons and equal amounts of sunlight. They just get it at different times of year.
To all my creatures on Earth, I make you a promise. I will rotate every 24 hours to give you daytime and nighttime. I will continue to wobble and tilt to give you seasons. I will travel around the sun once each year. And I will do all these things for billions of years to come. 
I am a planet you can trust.]]

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: Some support

Speech Bubbles

Vocabulary: More decoding/definition issues

Language: Few descriptive words

Sentences: Multiple phrases

Text structure: Oral/Natural

Inferences: Some implications

Complexity: Several ideas - closely related

Glossary

Additional activities

Features

First Person

Topic

*Space

Earth

Low Frequency Words

antarctica	continents	equator	global	grid
halves	identify	introduce	january	latitude
locations	longitude	luckiest	mercury	milder
nighttime	northern	rotating	seasons	sledding
solar	southern	tilted	unevenly	wobble