Are you wondering what you can do to improve your students’ reading test scores this year? Are you trying to supplement your lesson plans with Common Core-based resources? Maybe you’re trying to reduce or resolve the setbacks from summer?
Here are great online resources that will help your students in English Language Arts:
This free app and web-based platform allows teachers to assign leveled readings that can be embedded with quizzes, writing prompts, polls, and comments. Subtext has many texts pre-loaded, but you can always search for and upload your own digital text (e.g. a free Google book). In addition to collecting students’ responses to the pre-embedded prompts and quizzes, the system allows students to make their own annotations to the texts. There’s also a speech-to-text feature that works really well for struggling readers and English learners.
This free site provides current event news articles that are vetted and leveled (based on Lexile measures). You can assign the same reading to every student, but differentiate the lexile level based on your knowledge of individual ability. In other words, Jack might read the article at 780L while Jamal reads the same article at 1170L. Your students can then discuss the article as a group and you can be confident that everyone was equally capable of accessing the content. The best thing about Newsela is that it gives your students access to relevant and authentic non-fiction texts. It’s a great tool for bell-ringer activities.
If you’re looking for new ELA lesson plans or interactive activities (for individual or whole group instruction), ReadWriteThink is a great place to start. This nonprofit is supported by the IRA and NCTE, so you know the reading pedagogy behind the resources will be sound. They also provide at-home resources, so if you’re trying to get parents more involved in students’ reading success, you can suggest they look here as well.