Curated OER
Text Complexity in the Common Core
Use these tools to choose a text that is appropriate and challenging, while also fulfilling the Common Core’s requirement for text complexity.
Curated OER
Create College-Ready Readers with Text-Dependent Questions
Build content literacy and cater to the Common Core State Standards by creating text-dependent questions to accompany reading passages.
Penguin Books
Addressing Text Complexity - Making Independent Reading Meaningful
Many English teachers dream of a classroom full of readers silently enjoying their books. A useful guide helps make that dream become a reality by providing book recommendations for a range of readers. Each suggestion includes the...
Fluence Learning
Writing About Informational Text: Beyond the Beyond—Galaxies
Everyone has a different point of view, even when it comes to the enormity of the universe. Two separate text passages explain the scope of a galaxy, prompting young readers to write an essay about each author's argument and how the...
Fluence Learning
Writing About Informational Text: The Dred Scott Decision
Looking for a performance assessment that asks individuals to demonstrate their competency in writing about informational text? Use Frederick Douglass' essay "On the Dred Scott Decision," and an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln's 1857 speech...
Curated OER
Advertising in the Contemporary World: An Introduction to Persuasive Texts
Beginning a persuasive writing unit with your middle schoolers? Approach it through something that persuades us all: advertising! Through studying video and print advertisement, your class will practice Common Core skills for reading...
Ontario
Reading Informational Text
Learning to recognize the importance of the features of information text (i.e., titles, subtitles, endnotes, sidebars, etc.) is the focus of a reading activity designed for middle schoolers. Learners examine how these text features help...
Ontario
Reading Graphic Text
Do students really need to be taught how to read cartoons, comic books, and comic strips? Yes. Just as they need to learn how to read other forms of graphic text such as diagrams, photos, timetables, maps, charts, and tables. Young...
National Math + Science Initative
Reading an Informational Text: "It All Started with Sputnik"
Sputnik was one of the greatest scientific advancements of the 1950s, and this reading lesson does it justice. Pupils start off with pre-reading questions and a video. They then read an excerpt from an article, which is accompanied by...
University of North Carolina
Figures and Charts
Sometimes words aren't the best way to get information across to the reader. The eighth handout in the 24-part Writing the Paper series describes different type of figures and charts to display complex information in a paper....
Fluence Learning
Writing Informational Text: Community and School Gardens
Two informational texts feature community gardens of the past and present and how seeds grow. Scholars read, discuss what they have read, complete a timeline, define words, and compose a brief essay about the texts' main idea.
Fluence Learning
Writing About Informational Text: Political Parties
To demonstrate their ability to craft an analysis of informational text, class members read excerpts from James Madison's "The Federalist No. 10," from George Washington's Farewell Address, and from Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural...
Fluence Learning
Writing About Informational Text: Everybody Can Bike
A three-part assessment challenges scholars to read informational texts in order to complete three tasks. Following a brief reading, class members take part in grand conversations, complete charts, and work in small groups to research...
National Council of Teachers of English
Writing Acrostic Poems with Thematically Related Texts in the Content Areas
Scholars scour thematically aligned texts to gather a bank of words they can use in an original acrostic poem.
Curated OER
Perimeter and Area of Complex Figures
For this perimeter and area worksheet, students solve 6 word problems where they must determine the perimeter or area of complex figures. Diagrams are provided and real world applications like gardens and carpeting are used in the problems.
Bantam Books
The Tempest: Linked Text Set (Pre-Reading)
Before you begin your unit on William Shakespeare's The Tempest, introduce the themes of the play with a lesson based on the biblical story of Joseph. Taking your high schoolers through selected text from Genesis 17-44, the lesson...
Fluence Learning
Writing Informational Text: Lemonade Stand
Use a performance task to assess third graders' ability to read informational text. After they plan a lemonade stand business, young entrepreneurs implement that plan through informational writing. The task assumes learners can...
Fluence Learning
Writing About Literary Text: Wise or Foolish?
A three-part assessment promotes reading comprehension skills. Class members read literary texts and take notes to discuss their findings, answer comprehension questions, write summaries, and complete charts.
EngageNY
Summarizing Complex Ideas: Comparing the Original UDHR and the "Plain Language" Version
The eighth lesson plan in this series continues the focus on vocabulary and increasing young readers' awareness of academic language. Pairs of learners participate in a short vocabulary review activity called Interactive Words in which...
K20 LEARN
Sentence Structure in Siddhartha: Simple, Compound, Complex, and Compound-Complex Sentences
While wisdom may not be communicated, knowledge of sentence structures certainly can. Teach young grammarians the power of syntax with a instructional activity that uses Herman Hesse's Siddhartha as a mentor text. Learners first rewrite...
Nancy N. Boyles
Summary Frame for Story Text and Informational Text
Provide these templates as aids for pupils as they work to compose summaries of both stories and informational texts. The first two frames provide sentence starters to help learners structure their summaries and include all the necessary...
Fluence Learning
Writing About Literary Text: Pygmalion and Galatea
Is it crazy to fall in love with your own work, or is that the purest love of all? Compare two renditions of the classic Greek myth Pygmalion and Galatea with a literary analysis exercise. After students compare the similarities and...
Student Achievement Partners
"The Glorious Whitewasher" from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain with Mini-Assessment
It's the classic scene: Tom Sawyer is whitewashing a fence. Expose your learners to Mark Twain's humor while reinforcing reading comprehension. Eighth graders are encouraged to read and reread, achieving as much exposure to the text as...
Shmoop
ELA.CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9-10.10
Make sure that your pupils have mastered complex literary nonfiction by the end of the year and use this resource to help get them to that point. After a brief description of the Common Core standard, a list of age-appropriate...