Resources I’m Thankful for This Year
For me--and, I think, for many teachers--this stretch between late November and early December is an especially exhausting time of year. It feels like the year has been going forever, and we’re only about a quarter of the way through. Even Winter Break seems far off. The days are shorter, parent-teacher conferences are taking place, and it feels like there’s little time left outside of work to recharge.
Luckily, November presented us with an opportunity to reflect and think about things that we are thankful for. And there are a number of resources that have been lifesavers for me at one point or another in my teaching career, for which I’m very thankful. A few of them are below, along with ideas about how and when they might be most handy.
While there are several others I use, these are the ones I consider most helpful for teaching critical reading skills and sparking good conversations about selections we are reading.
I discovered CommonLit a few years ago and it has been helpful to me in a number of ways.
First, and most importantly for many of us, it gives me access to a wide range of rich selections that are not always available freely online. If I need a short story or poem to supplement something I’m teaching, CommonLit tends to be my go-to. Over the past several years, this product has grown and expanded to the point where they now have full-blown units, novel studies, ideas for writing assignments, etc. If you haven’t browsed the library yet, I highly recommend it.
Additionally, some of the features within CommonLit are really useful, especially if you are using this tool in a 1:1 situation. First, when assigning the reading, you can enable something called “Guided Reading Mode.” This feature provides the text in chunks and forces students to answer a comprehension question about each chunk before accessing the next. Using this feature helps me to teach students the important practice of stopping and checking for understanding before moving on in a selection.
One more feature that’s helpful is the assessment question alignment. Each question is linked with a particular standard, and when you review students’ responses, you can hone in on which standards correlated with the questions they missed most often, which can be very helpful if you’re required to do some sort of data-driven reporting or intervention on a targeted state standard.
CommonLit is a totally free tool for all teachers.
Newsela may be fairly well-known, but it’s still worth rehashing what this resource is and how it can be leveraged effectively.
The most important way I use Newsela is to differentiate my instruction for a range of reading levels. This tool provides news articles, historical pieces, and more at a range of reading levels. The reading levels for each piece can be modified, so you can assign the same text to some students at an 8th-grade level, to some students at a 6th-grade level, and to still others at a 4th-grade level (for example). Each version will come with quiz questions (as well as other exercises which vary from article to article), and those questions will be aligned to the same standard at each grade level.
I use Newsela extensively and in a variety of ways:
To give my students choices about what they read. For example, we are currently reading excerpts from The Illiad and The Odyssey through the lens of war, trauma, and the challenges for soldiers returning home. In preparation for this mini-unit, I created a Newsela assignment with six articles about various veteran groups who face unique challenges, and I asked students to each read one article. Because I have used Newsela before, each text will be assigned to each student at their reading level, but they also get to read an article that is, hopefully, of interest to them.
To supplement units with current events or historical context. Sometimes, the texts we are reading in a unit may be fairly out of date. For example, in an upcoming unit, “The Fight for Freedom,” students read several abolitionist texts from the civil war era. To provide more contemporary and high-engagement selections, I provide options for many lessons, letting students read the textbook-provide abolition texts, mid-20th-century Civil Rights movement texts, or South African Apartheid texts. For example, instead of all students reading a biography of Harriet Tubman, I give them the option to read a biography of the late Senator John Lewis or Nelson Mandela. They are all reading within the same genre and on the same theme, but they don’t have to read texts that are over 100 years old or that describe events from so far back in history--at least not for every lesson in the unit.
To provide alternative texts. For example, we teach a unit on horror in eighth grade and some parents object to their students reading texts with supernatural elements. Using Newsela’s extensive library, I’ve been able to locate nonfiction texts about the human fear response that students could read and still engage in the unit discussions.
Newsela is a freemium product. My district has purchased licenses that give us access to added features, but many features and texts are available for free.
A product of NCTE, Read Write Think provides a range of free resources for English Language Arts teachers. This resource is especially useful for writing resources. Their library houses many graphic organizers and sample lessons to help prepare students to plan and write an essay.
Many other resources are helpful for teaching active reading, helping students focus on certain topics or features of a text as they read.
Read Write Think is a free resource for teachers.
Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance)
Learning for Justice is a great resource for ensuring your lessons are culturally competent and designed to reach and empower all learners. This organization provides lots of great resources, including professional development resources, sample lesson plans, and student texts. Personally, I rely a lot on their frameworks, such as the social justice standards, to help me evaluate the quality of my lessons, learning objectives, and the overall climate in my classroom.
Learning for Justice is a free resource for teachers.
What resources are you using to supplement your textbook or in-class novels? Leave comments below to help other educators find additional resources and enrich our curriculum.
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