Text Leveling System

Lunch Money

RDQ:	1493	Max Word/Sent	83	Total Words	3137		Diff Words	910
Lex	820	Ave Word/.Sent	15	Hi Freq occurs	2234	71.2%	Hi freq	377	41.4%
AR	4.3	Long Sentences	30.2	Low Freq occurs	142	4.5%	Low freq	116	12.7%

Chapter 1
TALENT
Greg Kenton had heaps of talent. He was good
at baseball, and even better at soccer. He had a
clear singing voice, and he also played the
piano. He was a whiz at sketching and drawing,
and he did well at school-reading, science,
music, writing, art, math, gym, social studies the
whole deal. But as good as he was at all
these things, Greg's greatest talent had always
been money.
Greg had never taken money lessons. He
hadn't had a money tutor or gone to money
camp. His talent with money was natural. He
had always understood money. He knew how
to save it, how to keep track of it, how to grow
it, and most of all, how to make it.
It takes some kids years and years to figure
out that everything is worth something. Not
Greg. Sitting in a grocery cart by the door of
the supermarket, he had watched with sharp]]
brown eyes as his mom dropped a small metal
disk into a red machine. Then she'd turned the
crank, and a handful of M&M's had rattled out
into her hand. Greg loved the sweet, crunchy
taste, but it wasn't the candy that had captured
his imagination. It was that shiny silver
com.
While he was still a skinny preschooler with
curly brown hair, Greg had learned to keep his
eyes and ears open. One day at breakfast his
biggest brother, Ross, griped, "How come I
have to make my bed? I'm just going to mess it
up again tonight."
His other big brother, Edward, chimed in,
"And cleaning up our rooms every single morning?
That's not fair. Besides, they're our
rooms."
His mom had answered, "Yes, but your
rooms are in my house, and I like my house
tidy. So if you want to keep getting your
allowances every Friday, get back upstairs and
fix the mess."
Ross and Edward had grumbled all the way
back to their rooms. Their little brother followed
them, and two minutes later Greg had
started a housekeeping business: making a bed,]]
ten cents; putting dirty clothes in the laundry,
five cents; putting clean clothes away, two cents;
and hanging up used towels, three cents each.
If both his big brothers were complete slobs,
and they usually were, Greg earned a little
more than two dollars a week-so it was certainly
not a get-rich-quick scheme. But that
wasn't what Greg was trying to do. He was
perfectly happy to get rich slowly, because
being patient is a big part of having money talent.
Greg understood that a year has fifty-two
weeks. So between the ages of four and six
Greg transformed rumpled sheets, used
underwear, smelly socks, and soggy towels into
beautiful, spendable cash-more than two
hundred dollars. Then his mom shut down his]]
business, insisting that Ross and Edward had to
do their own chores.
When he was still in nursery school, Greg
had taken charge of recycling the family's
trash. He emptied all the waste baskets at least
once a week. At the bins out in the garage, he
sorted the newspapers and magazines from the
cardboard, the aluminum from the steel, and
the & plastic from the & plastic. As a
reward for this service, which took him only
ten minutes a week, Greg was allowed to keep
the deposit refunds on all the cans and bottles.
This added up to about four dollars a month in
the cool seasons and eight dollars a month during
the long, thirsty summer.
As a seven and eight-year-old, Greg had
found other ways to make money around
the house and yard. He shined his dad's and
mom's dress shoes for fifty cents a pair. He
scrubbed black heel. marks and old wax off
the floor tiles in the kitchen for ten cents a
square. He dug dandelions out of the lawn
at the rate of four for a nickel. And he
picked Japanese beetles off the shrubs for a
penny a bug.
At first Greg enjoyed simply having the]]
money he made. Cash was fun and interesting
all by itself. He liked sorting and stacking the
bills-singles, fives, tens, twenties, and even a
few fifties he'd gotten from his grandparents
for Christmas. He studied the faces of the
famous presidents, and Alexander Hamilton,
too--who he discovered was never president,
only the first secretary of the treasury of the
United States. He looked at the engraving on
the bills with a magnifying glass, studying the
tiny face of Lincoln sitting there on his big
square chair inside the Lincoln Memorial on
the back of every five-dollar bill.
Greg found the coins
just as interesting. He
loved making rolls of quarters,
dimes, nickels, and
pennies, stacks and stacks
of them. And the golden 
Sacagawea dollar coins?
He didn't put them into rolls. He
had collected twenty-seven of them, which he
kept hidden in a sock in the bottom drawer of
his dresser. Every once in a while he'd spread
them out on his bed and count them again.
Greg also became an amateur coin collector.]]
It was exciting to come up with a Mercury
dime now and then, and he'd found a couple
dozen of those gray pennies that had been
made out of steel instead of copper during the
Second World War. He had found pennies that
were worth ten dollars or more, and that can
get a kid thinking.
As nice as it was to have the money itself,
Greg quickly learned it was also fun to spend
some now and then. He would spend it for
something special, like his own professional quality
soccer ball, or one of those huge aluminum
flashlights with six batteries, that
could throw a beam of light all the way across
the lake at his grampa's cabin. He bought cool
stuff that he really wanted, and mostly when it
seemed too long a wait until his birthday or
Christmas. He bought collectible baseball
cards, and he had also bought a few Beanie
Babies and then sold them for a nice profit.
Sometimes he bought comic books, but only a
few, and only ones that looked like they would
become more valuable. Greg loved comics, but
he got to read all he wanted for free because
his dad collected them.
By the time he got to third grade, Greg had]]
set himself a goal. He wanted to be rich. He
thought it would be fantastic to be able to
spend all the money he wanted, anytime he
felt like it. If he wanted to get the world's
fastest computer plus a hundred of the best
games, no problem. If he wanted a car, a
speedboat, a house in the mountains, a home theater
system, or even a whole island out in
the middle of the Pacific-plus his own seaplane
and a private crew to fly him there-no
problem. Greg was sure that someday he'd be
able to get anything he wanted. All he'd need
was money.
And he wasn't that different from his
friends. A lot of them also dreamed about getting
rich, and some of them wanted to be
famous, too. Greg didn't care much about
fame. What was the point? Besides, he figured
that if he got rich enough, really super rich,
then the famous part would happen automatically
anyway. But there was one big difference
between Greg and most of his friends. He
wasn't just dreaming about getting rich. He
was working at it.
As Greg reached third grade and then
fourth, his whole neighborhood had become]]
the land of opportunity. He was thin, but wiry,
and strong enough to tackle any job he put his
mind to. Greg raked and bagged leaves in the
fall and again in the spring. He washed cars all
spring, summer, and fall, and on hot days he
sold lemonade. He shoveled snow and salted
icy sidewalks in the winter. Greg became a
feeder of cats, a walker of dogs, and a collector
of mail and newspapers for people on vacation.
He swept garages and straightened up messy
basements. If people ever decided to throw
things away, Greg kept the good stuff for himself
and hauled it home to his own little corner
of the Kenton family garage. And when he had
collected enough interesting junk, Greg would
drag it all out to the end of the driveway, put
up a sign, and hold a sale. Neighborhood
money filled Greg's pockets the way rain fills
puddles.
For example, consider what Greg earned
just from shoveling snow. He had eight customers
within two blocks of his house, and
every time it snowed, he shoveled their front
walks for a flat rate: ten dollars. The winter of
his third-grade year, it snowed six times, and
the winter of his fourth-grade year it snowed]]
five times. And eleven snowfalls times eight
customers equals eighty-eight shovel sessions,
times ten dollars for each one equals eight hundred
and eighty dollars-which isn't just a lot
of money to a nine-year-old. Eight hundred
and eighty dollars is a lot of money to anybody.
It hadn't taken Greg long to become the
family banker. If his mom and dad were running
late for a movie on a Saturday night, Greg
was happy to lend them twenty dollars-as
long as they signed his little record book and
promised to repay the money. And his parents
got special treatment. They didn't have to pay
Greg's usual lending fees. After all, they didn't
charge him for the food he ate, or for the safe,
warm bed he slept in every night. So that
seemed fair. But his two brothers had to pay
the regular rates.
If his older brother needed an extra five dollars
to get that new baseball glove in time to
break it in before the Babe Ruth tryouts, Greg
was happy to lend him the money-as long as
Edward signed the book and promised to pay
back the five dollars one week later, plus a
fifty-cent fee-and Greg got the old mitt as
part of the deal, because a used baseball glove]]
might be worth something at his next driveway
sale. And if Ross just had to have that hot
new CD the instant it arrived at the music
store, he knew his little brother would be
happy to help-for a fee.
Both Ross and Edward made fun of Greg's
moneymaking schemes. They called him Scrooge
and Mr. Cashman and Old Moneybags, and some
other nicknames too. Still, whenever they
needed money, they knew they would always
be welcome at the First Family Bank of Greg.
One Thursday shortly after Greg had finished
fourth grade, his dad pulled a reference
book off a shelf next to the computer in the
family room. Along with the information he'd
been looking for, he also found twelve five dollar
bills tucked between the pages. Only
one person in the family could have owned
that money, so at bedtime that night, he told
Greg that he'd found it.
Greg sat straight up in bed. "You put it all
 back, right?"
His dad said, "Absolutely.
But how about we go to the
bank on Saturday morning and open up a savings]]
account? That's where your money belongs."
Greg had looked at him suspiciously. "Why?"
"Because your money will be safe at the
bank, and it'll be there when you need it. Like
when you go to college."
Greg said, "But can I get my money out
before then? Like if I see something I need at a
yard sale?"
His dad nodded. "You're allowed to get your
money anytime you want. But if you take the
money out of the bank, then the money won't
grow."
"'Grow?" said Greg. "You mean 'earn interest,'
right?"
A little surprised, his dad had nodded and
said, "Right. Earn interest. If you put a hundred
dollars in the bank and leave it there for
one year, the bank will add five dollars more to
it, so then you'll have a hundred and five dollars.
That's called earning five percent interest
a year. And all the money has to do is sit there.
Pretty neat, huh?"
Greg thought about that. "So my money just
sits there?"
His dad said, "Well, actually, the bank will
probably lend your money to other people, and]]
then those other people will pay the bank
interest for being able to use it-just like the
bank pays you that five dollars of interest so
that it can use your money."
Greg said, "And I only get five dollars if I let
the bank use my hundred dollars for a whole
year? That stinks. Because if I spend two dollars
on lemon juice and sugar and paper cups,
and if I sell thirty cups of lemonade this weekend,
then in one weekend I'll make more
money than the bank would pay me all year."
"That's true," his dad said. "Making your
own business investments is a way to earn
more money faster-as long as you make good
investments. But if you keep hiding money
around the house, it could get lost. Or stolen."
"But what about your comic books?" Greg
asked. "You keep your whole collection right
here in the house."
His dad nodded. "True, but I've got an insurance
policy on them, and a special policy on
the most valuable ones. And if something happened
to my comics, the insurance company
would pay me back the money they're worth.
But you can't get an insurance policy on money
itself-unless you keep it in a bank. So if our]]
house burned down, you'd have no money at
all-none. And you'd get nothing back."
That got Greg's attention.
The next day Greg had retrieved money
from about thirty different hiding places
around the house and yard and garage. And
on Saturday morning he'd gone to the bank
and opened his own savings account with a
first deposit that amazed his dad-more than
three thousand two hundred dollars. And
that wasn't even all of Greg's money, just
most of it. He'd kept a couple hundred dollars
at home, because Greg already understood
that sometimes a business person needs
money right away.
By age eleven he was well on his way to success,
always on the lookout for new moneymaking
opportunities. And then one day Greg
Kenton made the greatest financial discovery
of his young life.]]
Chapter 2
QUARTERS
It was near the end of his fifth-grade year.
Around eleven thirty one morning during
silent reading Greg felt hungry, so he had
started to think about his lunch: a ham-and cheese
sandwich, a bag of nacho cheese
Doritos, a bunch of red grapes, and an apple cherry
juice box.
His mom had made him a bag lunch, which
was fine with Greg. Making a lunch was a lot
cheaper than buying one, and Greg loved saving
money whenever possible. Plus home food
was usually better than school food. And on
days he brought a bag lunch his mom also gave
him fifty cents to buy dessert. Which was also
fine with Greg. Sometimes he bought a treat,
and sometimes he held on to the money. On
this particular day he had been planning to
spend both quarters on an ice-cream sandwich.
Then Greg remembered where his lunch
was: at home on the kitchen counter. He did
have a dollar of his own money in his wallet,
and he had two quarters from his mom in his
front pocket, but a whole school lunch cost
two bucks. He needed two more quarters.
So Greg had walked to the front of the
classroom, waited until his teacher looked up
from her book, and then said Mrs  McCormick, I left my lunch at home. May I
borrow fifty cents?"
Mrs. McCormick had not missed a teaching
opportunity in over twenty years. So she
shook her head, and in a voice loud enough
for the whole class to hear, she said, I'm
sorry, but no, I will not lend you money. Do
you know what would happen if I handed out
fifty cents to all the boys and girls who forgot
their lunches? I'd go broke, that's what. You
need to learn to remember these things for
yourself."
Then, turning to the class, Mrs. McCormick
had announced, "Greg needs some lunch
money. Can someone lend him fifty cents?"
Over half of the kids in the class raised a
hand.
Embarrassed, Greg had hurried over to]]
Brian Lemont, and Brian handed him two
quarters.
"Thanks," Greg said. "Pay you back tomorrow."
Ten minutes later Greg was in the cafeteria
line, shaking all four quarters around in his
pocket. They made a nice clinking sound, and
that had reminded Greg how much he liked
quarters. Stack up four, and you've got a dollar.
Stack up twenty quarters, and that's five dollars.
Greg remembered one day when he had piled
up all his quarters on his dresser-four stacks,
and each had been over a foot tall. Stacking up
quarters like that always made Greg feel rich.
So on that day in April of his fifth-grade year,
Greg had started looking around the cafeteria,
and everywhere he looked, he saw quarters. He
saw kids trading quarters for ice-cream sandwiches
and cupcakes and cookies at the dessert
table. He saw kids over at the school store trading
quarters for neon pens and sparkly pencils,
and for little decorations like rubber soccer
balls and plastic butterflies to stick onto the
ends of those new pencils. He saw Albert
Hobart drop three quarters into a machine so
he could have a cold can of juice with his lunch.
Kids were buying extra food, fancy pens and]]
pencils, special drinks and snacks. There were
quarters all over the place, buckets of them.
And then Greg remembered those hands
that had been raised back in his classroom, all
those kids who'd had a couple of quarters to
lend him-extra quarters.
Excited, Greg had started making some calculations
in his head-another one his talents.
There were about 450 fourth, fifth, and sixth
graders at Ashworth Intermediate School. If
even half of those kids had two extra quarters
to spend every day, then there had to be at
least four hundred quarters floating around the
school. That was a hundred dollars a day, over
five hundred dollars each week-money, extra
money, just jingling around in pockets and
lunch bags!
At that moment Greg's view of school
changed completely and forever. School had
suddenly become the most interesting place on
the planet. Because young Greg Kenton had
decided that school would be an excellent
place to make his fortune.]]

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Dialog: Multiple speakers

Dialog: Broken dialogue

Dialog: Unlabeled Speaker

Vocabulary: Some difficult words

Language: Many descriptive words

Sentences: Some Long/Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Some implications

Concepts: Concrete/Simple Social

Chapters

Features

Character traits

Character development

Clear cause/effect

Simple Plot

Topic

Teacher/Teaching

Wealth

Money

Buying/Selling

Saving

Problem Solving

*Economics

*Schools & Education

School

Low Frequency Words

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calculations	cashman	clinking	collected	college
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embarrassed	emptied	excellent	fifties	fortune
garages	griped	grocery	hobart	housekeeping
imagination	insisting	instant	insurance	intermediate
investments	japanese	jingling	kenton	laundry
lemonade	lemont	lending	lunches	magazines
magnifying	mccormick	memorial	mercury	moneybags
moneymaking	neighborhood	neon	nicknames	nursery
opportunities	opportunity	pacific	particular	patient
percent	pockets	policy	preschooler	president
presidents	private	professional	profit	raked
recycling	refunds	repay	retrieved	reward
rumpled	sacagawea	scheme	schemes	science
seaplane	seasons	secretary	service	sessions
shortly	shovel	shoveled	shoveling	shrubs
sidewalks	sketching	slobs	social	sparkly
straightened	studied	studies	supermarket	suspiciously
swept	theater	tidy	transformed	treasury
treatment	tryouts	tutor	twenties	underwear
valuable	wallet	whiz	who'd	wiry
worth