As many teachers shift to the Common Core Standards, they are attempting to incorporate more complex texts and more informational/nonfiction texts into their curriculum. If you are asking yourself, “What is a complex text for my students?” check out this blog post I wrote explaining text complexity.
Many teachers are discovering that several websites offer informational texts available at various Lexile levels. Three of my favorites are:
1. The Smithsonian Tween Tribune
The Smithsonian Tween Tribune is a free resource for teachers and students. It has a massive collection of articles written at various Lexile levels. The articles also come with a quiz to assess comprehension, and students can post a comment about what they read.
2. Newsela
Newsela has a growing collection of articles on a range of topics, including the most current events. It’s free to access and read the articles at any Lexile level; however, teachers who want to annotate articles or track student progress need to pay for the Pro version.
3. CommonLit
CommonLit organizes the content on its site by theme. Teachers search for a topic related to what they are teaching (e.g., fear, resilience, love, or greed). Once they’ve selected a theme, they can view the texts that have been paired with that theme at a range of reading levels from elementary into high school. The texts include everything from famous speeches, historical documents, news articles to poems, and stories.
If you have additional online resources you use to find complex informational texts, please post a comment and share them!
11 Responses
[…] As many teachers shift to the Common Core Standards, they are attempting to incorporate more complex texts and more informational/nonfiction texts into their curriculum. If you are asking yourself, "What is a complex text for my students?" check out this blog post I wrote explaining text […]
[…] thing that prompted my memory was Catlin Tucker’s post about online informational texts resources. One of them was old hat for me: newsela.com. I had […]
[…] 3 Websites Where You Can Find Complex Informational Texts […]
At Texthelp, we created a list of great online content for students. We have a free guide for teachers to download here: https://docs.google.com/a/texthelp.com/forms/d/1l5rcI6CmgEQrbAjrFT3NAIBpMsBkzzDwuVJSEpYC0Kk/viewform?c=0&w=1 (hint: one is Newsela, but the rest are all unique from this post!)
Thank you for sharing, Elaine.
[…] 3 Websites Where You Can Find Complex Informational Texts […]
[…] And here are three websites for complex informational texts. […]
[…] 3 Websites Where You Can Find Complex Informational Texts […]
[…] For more websites where teachers can find texts that are written at different Lexile levels, check out my post “3 Websites Where You Can Find Complex Texts.” […]
[…] on close reading and I have students at different reading levels in a single class, I will use an online resource with texts at different Lexile levels to ensure the text is at an appropriate level to challenge each […]
[…] http://cluttered-record.flywheelsites.com/2015/09/3-websites-where-you-can-find-complex-informational-texts/ […]