Hey English Teachers! Check out Commonlit.org!

I recently stumbled upon what looks to be a jewel of site called Commonlit. It boasts that it is made by teachers for teachers. "COMMONLIT is a collection of poems, short stories, news articles, historical documents, and literature for classrooms."

In three simple steps, you can find thematic texts connected to an essential discussion question. Texts are sorted by grade level bands for 5th-12th grade, and also include the Lexile measure.

STEP 1: Choose a theme
There are several to select from, such as resilience, power & greed, and love.

STEP 2: Choose what they call a discussion question from within that theme. Most of themes I clicked on had two discussion questions.

STEP 3: Download the PDF versions of texts you are interested in using. The text selections I clicked on included text-based questions, discussion questions, and most had a text pairing guide for teachers. We all know that we have a range of readers in class, so I suggest looking through all the grade level options to see what will work best for your students.

It's online and free. Awesome. You don't even have to register for an account. Even more awesome. However, you can subscribe to get email updates. I hope you find some good stuff on there. Let me know how you use it! (Below is a screenshot of the homepage. The link is below the pic.)

http://www.commonlit.org/

Happy Reading,

Chandra

To Infinity...and Beyond (Google)

There is a lot of information out there…..both authoritative as well as junk.  Students often need help in muddling through the plethora of information available.  The following search engines are credible alternatives to standard Google, the largest search engine on the planet. 

http://www.ipl.org

A public service organization and learning/teaching environment that is maintained by students and volunteer library and information science professionals.  This site is hosted by Drexel University’s College of Information Science and Technology. 

www.sweetsearch.com

Every website in SweetSearch has been evaluated by research experts.

http://scholar.google.com

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature.  

http://www.refseek.com/

Web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone.  RefSeek searches more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.  

Happy Researching!

Laura Holland

AHS Media Specialist

AHS Literacy Team Member

Online Text

I just spent a week with a group of hardworking Asheboro City Schools teachers who helped to find free, online text resources for English Language Arts teachers.  In the fall, we will roll out a site with links to fiction and nonfiction exemplar texts, as well as readings represented in local and published unit plans.  A good portion of our work was around evaluating text complexity, as well.  Here is a great video that explains the three considerations in evaluating text complexity:  quantitative measures, qualitative measures, and reader & task.


Introduction to Text Complexity from NYC DOE Promising Pract on Vimeo.

I also have a LiveBinder with links to sites that provided easy access to many of our text selections:

Free Online Text

Thanks to Meredith Wolfe (NAMS), Julia Dawson (SAMS), Brenda Kern (AHS), and Kathy Saunders (AHS) for all their work!

~Chandra