Text Leveling System

Wish

RDQ:	1225	Max Word/Sent	44	Total Words	3317		Diff Words	911
Lex	780	Ave Word/.Sent	11	Hi Freq occurs	2502	75.4%	Hi freq	379	41.6%
AR	4.0	Long Sentences	15.9	Low Freq occurs	137	4.1%	Low freq	105	11.5%

One
I looked down at the paper on my desk.
The "Getting to Know You" paper.
At the top, Mrs. Willibey had written "Charlemagne
Reese."
I put a big X over Charlemagne and wrote "Charlie."
My name is Charlie. Charlemagne is a dumb name for
a girl and I have told my mama that about a gazillion
times.
I looked around me at all the hillbilly kids doing math
in their workbooks.
My best friend, Alvina, told me they would be hillbilly
kids.
"You will hate it in Colby," she said. "There's just red
dirt roads and hillbilly kids there." She had flipped her]]
silky hair over her shoulder and added, "I bet they eat
squirrels."
I glanced at the lunch boxes under the desks around
me and wondered if there were any squirrel sandwiches
in them.
I looked back down at the paper in front of me. I was
supposed to fill in all this stuff so my new teacher could
get to know me.
On the line beside Describe your family, I wrote,
"Bad."
What is your favorite subject in school? "None."
List three of your favorite activities. "Soccer, ballet,
and fighting."
Two of those favorite activities were lies but one of
them was the truth.
I am fond of fighting.
My sister, Jackie, inherited Daddy's inky black hair
and I inherited his fiery red temper. If I had a nickel for
every time I've heard "The apple don't fall far from the
tree," I'd be rich. Daddy fights so much that everybody
calls him Scrappy. In fact, at this very minute, while I'm
stuck here in Colby, North Carolina, surrounded by hillbilly
kids, ole Scrappy is back in Raleigh in the county
jail again because of his fondness for fighting.]]
And I don't need a crystal ball to know that at this very
minute, in our house in Raleigh, smack-dab in the middle
of the day, Mama is in bed with the curtains drawn and
empty soda cans on the nightstand. She will stay in that
bed the livelong day. If I was there, she wouldn't care
one little bit if I went to school or stayed on the couch
watching TV and eating cookies for lunch.
"But that's just the tip of the iceberg," that social services
lady said when she rattled off a list of reasons why
I was getting shipped off to this sorry excuse for a town
to live with two people I didn't even know. "It's better to
stay with kin," she told me. "Gus and Bertha are kin."
"What kind of kin?" I asked.
She explained how Bertha is Mama's sister and Gus is
her husband. She said they didn't have any kids and they
were happy to take me in.
"Then how come Jackie gets to stay with Carol Lee?"
I asked about a million times. Carol Lee is Jackie's best
friend. She lives in a fancy brick house with a swimming
pool. Her mama gets out of bed every morning and her
daddy is not called Scrappy.
So that lady told me again how Jackie was practically
a grownup and would be graduating from high school
in a couple of months.]]
When I pointed out that I was in fifth grade and not
exactly a baby, she sighed and smiled a fake smile and
said, "Charlie, you have to live with Gus and Bertha for
a while."
I'd never laid eyes on those people and now I was supposed
to live with them? When I asked how long I had
to be there, she said until things settled down and Mama
got her feet on the ground.
Well, how hard is it to put your dang feet on the
ground? is what I thought about that.
"You need a stable family environment," she told me.
But I knew what she really meant was, "You need a
family that's not all broken like yours is."
Still, I whined and argued and whined and argued, but
here I am in Colby, North Carolina, staring down at this
"Getting to Know You" paper.
"Have you finished, Charlemagne?" Mrs. Willibey was
suddenly beside me.
"My name is Charlie," I said, and a greasy-haired boy
in the front of the class let out a sputtering laugh. I sent
one of my famous glares his way till he hushed up and
turned red.
I handed Mrs. Willibey that paper and watched her
eyes dart back and forth as she read it. Her neck got]]
splotchy red and the corners of her mouth twitched. She
didn't even look at me before she marched back up to
the front of the room and dropped that paper on her desk
like it was a hot potato.
I slumped down in my seat and wiped my sweaty
palms on my shorts. It was only April, but it was already
hot as blazes.
"You want me to help you with that?" The boy in
front of me pointed at the math worksheet on my desk.
He had red hair and wore ugly black glasses.
"No," I said.
He shrugged, took a pencil out of his desk, and headed
to the pencil sharpener.
Up.
Down.
Up.
Down.
That's how he walked.
Like one leg was shorter than the other.
And he dragged one foot along the floor, so his sneaker
made squeaking noises.
I glanced at the clock.
Dang it! I had missed 
I have a list of all the ways there are to make a wish,]]
like seeing a white horse or blowing a dandelion. Looking
at a clock at exactly  is on my list. I'd learned
that from some old man who owned the bait and tackle
shop out by the lake where Scrappy and I used to go fishing.
Now that I'd missed , I was going to have to
find another way to get in my wish for the day. I hadn't
missed one single day of making my wish since the end
of fourth grade, so I sure didn't want to miss one now.
Then Mrs. Willibey nodded toward that redheaded
boy sharpening his pencil and said, "Howard, why don't
you be Charlie's Backpack Buddy for a while?"
Mrs. Willibey explained that when a new kid comes
to school, their Backpack Buddy shows them around and
tells them the rules till they get settled.
Howard grinned and said, "Yes, ma'am," and that
was that. I had a Backpack Buddy whether I wanted one
or not.
The rest of the afternoon creeped along so slow I
couldn't hardly stand it. I stared out the window while
kids took turns bragging about their social studies projects.
A misty rain had begun to fall and dark gray clouds
hovered over the tops of the mountains in the distance.
When the bell finally rang, I hightailed it out of there
and headed for the bus. I hurried up the aisle and dropped]]
into the last row. I kept my eyes on a piece of dried-up
chewing gum stuck to the seat in front of me while I sent
laser thoughts zipping and zapping around the bus.
Do not sit next to me.
Do not sit next to me.
Do not sit next to me.
If I had to be stuck on a bus full of kids I didn't even
know, I wanted to at least sit by myself.
My laser thoughts seemed to be working, so I took my
eyes off of the gum and glanced out the window.
That redheaded boy with the up-down walk was hurrying
toward the bus, his backpack bouncing against
him with every step.
When he got on the bus, I quickly looked back at the
gum and sent my laser thoughts out again.
But that boy didn't waste a minute shuffling up the
aisle and plopping himself right down next to me.
Then he thrust his hand out at me and said, "Hey. I'm
Howard Odom." He pushed at his ugly black glasses and
added, "Your Backpack Buddy."
Now, what kind of kid shakes hands like that? No kid
I ever knew.
He kept his hand there and stared me down till I
couldn't help myself. I shook hands with him.]]
"Charlie Reese," I said.
"Where you from?"
"Raleigh."
"Why're you here?"
He sure was nosy. But I figured if I laid out the cold
hard truth, that would shut him up, and maybe he
wouldn't want to be my Backpack Buddy anymore.
"My daddy's in jail and my mama won't get out of
bed," I said.
Well, that boy didn't even blink an eye. "What's he in
jail for?"
"Fighting."
"Why?"
"What do you mean?"
He wiped at his fogged-up glasses with the bottom of
his T-shirt. His face was flushed pink in the damp heat of
the bus. "Why was he fighting?" he said.
I shrugged. There was no telling why Scrappy was
fighting. Besides, there were probably a bunch of other
reasons he was in jail, but nobody ever tells me anything.
"Gus and Bertha told my mama you were coming.
They go to my church and I gave them a cat one time,"
Howard said. "A scrawny gray cat that was living up
under my porch."]]
Then he went on and on about how Gus taught him
how to make a slingshot and how sometimes Bertha sells
bread-and-butter pickles by the side of the road in the
summer. How his mama drove her car right into the ditch
beside Gus and Bertha's driveway one time and Gus
pulled it out with a tractor and then they all ate barbecue
sandwiches in the front yard.
"You'll like living with them," he said.
"I'm not living with them," I told him. "I'm going
back to Raleigh."
"Oh." He looked down at his freckly hands in his lap.
"When?"
"When my mama gets her feet on the ground."
"How long does that take?"
I shrugged. "Not long."
But the knot in my stomach told me that was a lie.
The worry clutching at my heart told me my mama might
never get her feet on the ground.
As the bus pulled out of the parking lot and headed
toward town, Howard rattled off a list of school bus
rules. No saving seats. No gum. No writing on the back
of the seats. No cussing. A whole mess of rules that I
was pretty sure nobody paid any mind to except maybe Howard.]]
I looked out the window at the sorry sights of Colby.
A gas station. A trailer park. A laundromat. Wasn't much
of a town, if you asked me. No malls or movie theaters.
Not even a Chinese restaurant.
Before long, the bus was making its way up the mountain.
The rain had stopped and wavy plumes of steam
drifted up off the asphalt. The narrow road curved back
and forth and round and round. Every now and then, the
bus stopped to let some kid off at a pitiful-looking house
with a red-dirt yard. We were almost to Gus and Bertha's
when the bus stopped and Howard said, "See ya."
Another, younger-looking redheaded boy got off with
him. I watched them make their way across the weed filled
yard to their house. Bikes and skateboards and
footballs and sneakers were scattered from the front
door to the road. A garden hose snaked from a dripping
faucet to a hole in the yard. A small, dirty-faced boy was
dropping rocks into the hole, sending up splashes of
muddy water.
Howard waved as the bus pulled away, but I turned
my eyes back to that dried-up gum.
When we finally got to Gus and Bertha's long gravel
driveway, I got off and watched the bus drive away,
making the rain-soaked Queen Anne's lace bob at the]]
edge of the road. I was starting up the driveway when I
noticed something shiny in the dirt at the edge of the
road.
A penny!
I darted over and picked it up. Then I hurled it as far
as I could and made my wish quick before that penny
hit the road and bounced into the woods.
There! I'd gotten in my wish for the day.
Maybe this time it would finally come true.]]
Two
I trudged up the long driveway, jumping over puddles of
muddy rainwater and wondering what Jackie was doing
right that very minute. Probably smoking cigarettes with
some boy in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly across
from the high school. Everybody thinks my sister is an
angel straight down from heaven, but I know better.
When Gus and Bertha's house finally came into view,
I stopped. I'd been there four days already but I still
couldn't get over how that house hung off the side of the
mountain like it did. The front of the house sat smack on
the ground with flowering shrubs nestled right up against
it. But the back was on stilts stuck into the steep mountainside.
On top of the stilts was a tiny porch with two
rocking chairs and window boxes full of flowers perched
on the railing.]]
On my first night in Colby, Gus had dragged a kitchen
chair out there for me after supper. Bertha had asked me
about a million questions, like what was my favorite
subject in school and did I have a lucky number? Did I
want to go swimming at the Y sometime and did I like
boiled peanuts? But I just mumbled and shrugged till she
finally stopped. I was too mad to talk. What was I doing
there on that porch with these people I didn't even know?
I felt like I'd been tossed out on the side of the road like
a sack of unwanted kittens. So the three of us sat in silence,
watching the sun sink behind the mountain and
the lightning bugs twinkle off and on among the pine
trees.
I'd spent the next three days trying to convince Gus
and Bertha that it was dumb for me to go to school since
it was almost summer. But the next thing I knew, I was
sitting on that bus full of hillbilly kids on my way to
school.
"Hey, there," Bertha called from the front door as I
made my way across the yard. A fat orange cat darted
out from behind the garden shed and trotted along
beside me. Gus and Bertha had a whole passel of cats,
sleeping under the porch, sunning on the windowsills,
swatting bees out in the garden.
I went inside and dropped my backpack on Gus's ]]
tattered easy chair. The smell of warm cinnamon drifted
through the kitchen door.
"I made coffee cake," Bertha said. "I wonder why they
call it coffee cake. Not a drop of coffee in it." She held
the door open for the cat to come in. "Oh, I know. I bet
'cause you're supposed to drink coffee when you eat it.
You think? Well, anyways, who cares, right?"
It had been clear to me from day one that Bertha was
a talker. Not like her sister, my mama, who went for days
without saying a word. I had been surprised when I saw
how much they looked alike, though. Same mousy brown
hair. Same long, thin fingers. Even the same crinkly lines
along the sides of their mouths.
I sat at the kitchen table and watched Bertha cut a
thick slice of coffee cake and put it on a paper towel in
front of me. Then she pulled her chair close to mine and
said, "Tell me every little thing about your first day. Your
teacher. The other kids. What your classroom looks like.
What you had for lunch. What you did at recess. Every
little thing."
"Some girl ate a squirrel sandwich," I said.
Bertha's eyebrows shot up. "A squirrel sandwich? Are
you sure?"
I licked my finger and pressed it on the paper towel]]
 to get coffee cake crumbs. I nodded but I didn't look at
her when I said, "I'm sure."
A small gray cat sat on the kitchen counter grooming
himself. I wondered if that was the one Howard had
given them. Bertha picked him up and kissed the top of
his head. "Charlie don't want cat hair in her coffee cake,
Walter." Then she gently put him down on the linoleum
floor. His tail twitched as he watched a line of tiny ants
marching from under the sink to a dark spot of something
sticky by the stove.
"And there's an up-down boy in my class," I said.
Bertha cocked her head. "What in the name of sweet
Bessie McGee is an up-down boy?" She snapped a brown
leaf off of a plant on the windowsill and tucked it into
her pocket.
"This boy named Howard who walks up and down,
like this." I walked like Howard around the kitchen
table.
"Howard Odom," Bertha said. "Bless his heart. Good
as gold, that boy is. Don't bat an eye when kids poke fun
at him, calling him names like Pogo." She shook her
head. "I swear, kids can be so mean sometimes."
"Pogo?"
"Yeah, you know, like a pogo stick."]]
"He oughta punch their lights out," I said. "That's
what I'd do."
Bertha widened her eyes at me, then shook her head.
"Not that boy. He wouldn't hurt a fly. All them Odoms
are like that. Good-hearted. Kinda wild sometimes, those
brothers of his. But good-hearted." She brushed crumbs
off the table and tossed them into the sink. "Shoot, just
last week, three of those boys were over here helping
Gus replace them boards on the porch that got eat up
with termites and they wouldn't take one penny. We sent
them home with a burlap bag full of turnips and they
were happy as clams."
Turnips? Any kids who were happy about a bag of
turnips must be weird, if you asked me.
Bertha sat at the table beside me again. "So what
else?" she said. "Tell me something else about school."
I shrugged. I wasn't going to tell her about that "Getting
to Know You" paper dropped onto Mrs. Willibey's
desk like a hot potato or about Howard being my Backpack
Buddy, so I just said, "Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nope."
Bertha slapped her hand on the kitchen table. "I
almost forgot," she said. "I got you something." She]]
motioned for me to follow her down the hall to the tiny
spare room where I'd been sleeping.
"Ta-da!" She flung her arm out and grinned.
I followed her gaze to the narrow bed in the corner.
Propped up against the wall were two pillows in pink
pillowcases with Cinderella on them.
"I realized this morning that this room don't look one
bit like a little girl's room," Bertha said. "So I went down
to Big Lots and got those pillowcases. I was gonna get the
matching bedspread but it was a double and not a twin.
I might go back and get this fluffy pink rug they have
if I can get Gus to help me move that bureau. And I know
I need to get my canning jars out of here, and that old
TV don't even work anymore but ... "
She rambled on and on but I didn't even listen. Cinderella
pillowcases? She must think I'm five instead of
almost eleven. She sure didn't know much about kids.
That afternoon Jackie called from Raleigh. She told
me how Carol Lee's cousin came to visit and gave her a
cashmere sweater she didn't want anymore. And Carol
Lee's daddy was teaching her how to drive since Scrappy
never would. She said she was thinking about putting
blue streaks in her hair and that some boy named Arlo
was taking her to a NASCAR race down in Charlotte.]]

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Dialog: Multiple speakers

Dialog: Broken dialogue

Dialog: Unlabeled Speaker

Vocabulary: Few decoding/definition issues

Language: Few descriptive words

Sentences: Some Long/Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Some implications

Concepts: Concrete/Simple Social

Chapters

Features

Character development

Clear cause/effect

First Person

Topic

Wishes

Dogs

Family

Friendship

Moving

*Family & Friends

Low Frequency Words

activities	aisle	anyways	asphalt	ballet
bureau	burlap	cashmere	cigarettes	cinnamon
creeped	crinkly	curtains	curved	cussing
dandelion	drawn	environment	faucet	fiery
flowering	flung	flushed	fogged	fondness
freckly	gazillion	glares	gonna	graduating
gravel	grooming	haired	hearted	hillbilly
hovered	hurled	kin	kinda	laser
laundromat	linoleum	livelong	ma'am	mcgee
motioned	mountainside	mousy	nestled	nightstand
nosy	ole	oughta	palms	passel
perched	pillowcases	pitiful	plumes	pogo
practically	projects	propped	railing	rainwater
rambled	reasons	redheaded	restaurant	scrappy
scrawny	services	shrubs	shrugged	shuffling
skateboards	slingshot	social	splotchy	sputtering
stable	stilts	studies	sunning	surrounded
swear	sweater	talker	tattered	termites
theaters	thrust	trudged	turnips	twitched
wavy	weird	whined	why're	widened
windowsill	windowsills	workbooks	worksheet	younger