Scholastic Book Finder

I'm sure you know that Scholastic is a very valuable resource for both teachers and parents (if you didn't know that, you do now! I highly suggest checking out their website!). What you may not know, however, is that Scholastic can help parents, teachers, and students pick out books for students to read that will both challenge them and keep them interested! Oh, and it's FREE, too! :)

The first feature I love about the Scholastic Book Wizard is that you can type in the name of any children's or young adult's book and the Wizard will tell you the following wealth of information about the story:

• what grade level(s) can handle reading the book
• what grade level(s) would be interested in the content of this book
• the Lexile measure (if you use that in your room)
• the genre
• themes/topics addressed
• possible sensitive or questionable issues in the book
• a short blurb of the plot

I'm love how much information is available at just the press of a button! 

As if that's not enough, they have another really cool feature: the BookALike. Teachers (or whomever) can type in the name of a book that a student particularly loved reading. The BookALike can spit out names of books that similar in content and grade level. Another feature of the BookALike is that you can adjust the grade level before you search. For instance, let's say one of my freshman reading students expressed his love for Where the Red Fern Grows by William Rawls, but he and I both know he should be reading on a much higher level than WTRFG (which is a 6.4 reading level, by the way). Let's say the student in question is really reading at a 9th grade level. So I type the title into the BookALike and ask it to find a similar book at a 9th grade reading level.

(See how I selected the "3 grades harder" tool? Since Where the Red Fern Grows is leveled at 6.4, increasing the difficulty by 3 grades will ensure that my freshman student is reading a book more suited for his needs.)

I click "Find Similar Books" and the BookALike generates other reading options. For this particular book, it generated only 12 other options (I've noticed it generates less options when the book difficulty is at a higher level), but that hasn't been the case when I've researched other books in the past.

Once you get to the search results screen, you can filter the results any way you like: interest level, reading level, book type, topic/subject, genre/theme, etc. It's pretty handy!

Scholastic also provides a widget so that you can place it anywhere on your own website! So if you have a classroom website, kids can use the BookALike and Book Wizard right on the class's homepage! 

Nifty. :)

Here's a copy of the Book Wizard widget for your convenience: