I’m a little late again for Appy Monday, but I figured it’s never too late to share great information.We’ll think of today’s post as Techy Tuesday instead, okay?? So yesterday, I went to a professional development sharing session. We got in small groups, and we shared what has worked well for us, what we needed help with, and exchanged idea. One of the teachers needed ideas on how to reach struggling readers with comprehension. She mentioned how frustrating it is when the students are assessed with long passages. Of course, passages caused Read Works to pop in my mind as I’ve used it some when I needed articles for my kids. She had not heard of it before, so I decided I needed to blog about it and share what it has to offer since there are probably other teachers who may be unfamiliar with it too..

Read Works is completely free and the content of the material is varied. All you have to do is sign up for an account with your school information. On the site, there are informational and literary texts that are leveled by topic, genre, grade level, and lexile level. Teacher judgement is probably best when selecting articles as you may find the levels being too high or too low for your kid, but even so, it is nice to have a reference level to begin. Caution is given when printing the articles because each file includes the article, two pages of questions, and then the same questions with the answer key.  I found some questions to be lower level questions, so teacher may choose to create their own based upon the reading versus using the full collection.

When selecting an article, you will see the selection bar like this above.  You can search by key word, grade level, lexile, type of text and skill.  In addition to the articles, there are read aloud lessons for primary students, novel units for fifth grade and up, and you can search by skill too.  I looked up Point of View recently, and there were lessons starting at grade three with specifically which point of view the lesson addressed. I was also looking for materials to help my students with context clues and there were lessons for all grades working that skill. The skills included are to the right.

This week, my students are working on poetry, and I was having trouble finding poems and materials that are worded similar to how my students will be assessed on our state assessment in May.  I found a 64 page sequenced lesson plan with all of the materials I need.  The lesson plan is done, but I may have to modify it to meet my division’s requirements. I don’t have to worry about whether it’s okay to use the poem for classroom use as Read Works has verified that already and put the poems into a printable format.

Recently, Read Works was even recognized with two awards, The Revere Award for 2014 by the Association of American Publishers and the CODIE Award for Reading/English/ELL Instructional Solutions. So, by all means, bookmark this site and check out how it might help you in working with your students. Just click the image below.