A Dozen Nonfiction Reading Resources for Students

As non-fiction reading becomes a higher priority in the educational environment, here is a list of non-fiction reading resources that may be of help to your classroom.  Teachers in Northeast Oregon use several of these sites, so I hope you may find a couple that can benefit your classroom or student as well.

• Tween Tribune  Students find the news stories interesting and worth in reading.  There are four levels of articles including k-4, 5-8, 9-12, and Spanish.  Stories have thought provoking questions at the end to extend the readers mind.  Teachers can set up classroom environments to  help check for student understanding and allow for readers to submit comments. 

• Newsela  Non-fiction and current news related events are written in student friendly articles.  Each article can be read under different Lexile reading levels consisting of 690, 830, 980, 1130, and max.  Articles can be filtered under 8 different anchor standards, including Central Idea, Word Meaning and Choice, or Point of View as a few examples.  Some of the article contain a quiz at the end to help check for understanding.  Teachers can set up classroom environments to help check for understanding and monitor student progress through passages. 

• Youngzine  Readers enjoy reading a magazine containing articles and features tailored to the interests of students.  Also available are news related videos for a variety of mediums.  Teachers can set up classroom environments to help check for understanding and monitor student progress through passages.  If a student desires to be published, they can submit their article for future consideration. 

• Dogo News  Students can search news content by grades or categories, view stories associated with a mapped location, and read through kid website reviews.  All resources have comments providing viewer feedback, and any article may be embedded into a blog or website.  Teachers can create a personalized learning environment for their students by created accounts. 

• Wonderopolis  Each day a wonder of the day is published providing students answers to questions they may be curious about.  For example, what does it mean to be immune, or  what happens when lightning strikes a tree?  Each wonder contains a list of vocabulary associated with the article called "wonder words".  Wonders have a built in audio version, as well as investigation questions for those more curious minds.

• Scholastic News  A variety of article and videos are available from Scholastic at News for Your Classroom.  In one click students can navigate to other elementary grade level magazines or secondary subject matter magazines.  If you need magazines in Spanish, French, or Dutch, they are also available.

• Science News for Students  A nice variety of articles related to all sorts of science related topics are available to read.  Several student resources are available including ideas for student projects, digital badging, and Eureak! lab.  A section of Science in the News offers feature articles, bizarre or gory details, and viewpoints providing a variety of scientific reading experiences.

• Time for Kids  You've read Time magazine, now there is Time for Kids, TFK, containing current related article from topics all around the world.  Students can read articles from Kid Reporters, view photos, and watch videos.  TFK created Mini Sites intended to host many articles under one topic, like the Olympics or Antarctica.   Create logins to access quizzes, worksheets, and more.

• Hey There Everywhere  A good selection of articles with containing information in a variety of mediums and styles.  For instance an article may be read as an interview, or another article may contain videos supporting written content. In searching through archives, one can choose from a category or by a month/year.

• GoGo News   Student friendly news and student friendly topics are available under different topics including Planet, Animals, and Picks.  There is also a free app designed for mobile environments availabe from GoGo News.

• Teaching Kids News  Timely relevant news articles are available for kids, parents, and classrooms. Articles contain extension questions, grammar features, and discussion prompts allowing for more in-depth exploration of topics.  For the most part, content is written for grades 2-8.

• Our Little Earth   Stories are written to provide students an opportunity to learn about current issues happening in today's world.  Every two weeks an issue is published.  Teachers can sign up to have the issue delivered to your email inbox for free.

Curriculet - Create your own online reading curriculum

Curriculet is a free site that allows teachers to add their own questions, annotations, links, and quizzes to books, pdfs, blog posts, or other online reading passages.

Creation of a class and adding students is all free, as well as many already uploaded free domain books and reading passages from ReadWorks.org.  In addition, uploading articles from blogs and other websites was simple by URL. Once uploaded, Curriculet changes the formatting, taking away all the ads and additional links, and allows for the adding of the teacher's own questions and quizzes.

Add Content via Files or URL or from the Curriculet Store

Example from TeenTribune article:

Add questions, annotations, or quizzes by click and holding.  Students can add their own annotations for their own notes as well, view able only to themselves. 

Student View of the book Call of the Wild

After assigning a book or passage to a class, teachers can monitor student progress by student or by question.  Adding students to a class requires adding by URL or a class "token" that they enter when signing up.  Students are required to use an email and teachers do not have access to change their passwords.   If students use Google, they can use a quick Google Sign In.

Curriculet is mobile friendly, working on any device that can access the internet.  This is great from BYOD situations, iPads, tablets, chromebooks, smartphones, etc.   More information about accessing newer titles, not just free domain, recently was posted on the their blog here.

It was easy to use and has a great guide for quick questions.  I personally would like to see the ability to have the text read aloud, but for the features it currently has, this site would be highly useful in any class!  

  

Awesome Stories - Primary Source Research for Students

Awesome Stories is a great free story based research site that provides additional media with a focus on cited primary resources.  The stories are high interest, focusing on events from the present as well as the past.

With the recent passing of Nelson Mandela there are story snippets from his book Long Walk to Freedom. Each page contains numerous additional resources in the form of hyperlinks within the text as well as from the list on the side of primary source photos, movies, sound files, and other media.   

Students can use the search bar to look for specific topics or use explore the calendar to see stories for that week.

With the free version of this site there is access to all the stories and the primary sources.  With an additional silver membership (free for a 30 day trial) there are expanded options such as teacher account with student tracking, audio read alongs, visual vocabulary builder activities, CCSS alignment resources as well as other features.  A more advanced gold level is in the works.

Non Fiction Reading with Newsela

Virgina Petit shared a great resource yesterday for non fiction articles that connect directly to the ELA Anchor Standards of the CCSS.  The clincher with Newsela is the ability to change the Lexile Reading Level of the article, customizing it for the class or the student.  Signing up was easy as a teacher.  It gives a class code to give to the students to sign up for the specific class.  No emails are needed for the students.  Google sign in is also an option.

These are high interest daily news articles focused around the topics war & peace, science, kids, money, law, health, and arts.  There are four different levels offered for each article, with the four ranges varying  from third grade to college prep levels.

Easily assign an article to a class.

 Here is a look at the beginning of the same article at two different reading levels.

660L 

1020L

Quiz adapts to the Reading Level as well.  

If a quiz is avaliable to take with the passage, it will show along the right hand side of the screen.  In the teacher view, it will show the question, the correct answer, as well as the standard the question is addressing.

 Both students and teachers have a binder at the top of the screen.  This allows for the students to see if a specific article has been assigned.  For the teacher, it gives a view of which anchor standards have been addressed, over all class scores, as well as being able to view individual student work.

Student View

This is just another site to add to your resource list.  This site is also iPad compatible, easily add the link to the log in page onto the iPad.
We can never have to many sources for non fiction!
Newsela is currently free and in BETA.

Word Sift - Play with Words!

I enjoy using word clouds for a variety of projects with students.  Recently while at a conference, I attended a session by Ramsey Musallam (www.cyclesoflearning.com) who shared a lot of great stuff!  One of the many tools he shared with us was WordSift .  I thought I had heard of all the word cloud generators.  But this one is different and a great tool for any classroom.   

www.wordsift.com

As you can see below, I cut and pasted a blog post from our iPad blog into WordSift .  It then sifted my post and created a tagcloud of the 50 most common words (notice no "and"s "the"s, etc...).  Based on the text size, you can easily visualize what word I used the most in that post!

But beyond creating a cloud of words, the tools included take this word cloud generator to a new level of usefulness.  No, it doesn't make it into heart shapes or fun colors, but it makes "playing" with the words more interactive.  

Below I clicked on the word "writing" in my tag cloud.  From that, under my cloud, it found images for the word "writing" as well as mapping it using the Visual Thesaurus widget.   Pretty nifty!

But then there is the power of the Workspace!

Under the tagcloud box there is an option to "Create Workspace" (circled in the image below).  By creating a workspace for the words I can click and drag the words and move them about.   

And not just words, but I can pull images into my workspace as well!  As you can see below, I clicked on the word "student" on my workspace, images for student were generated in the box below, and then by clicking "Make Images Draggable" I then was able to drag photos to my work space. 

And finally (for now) when I click on any of the words in my workspace or tagcloud, I also am given examples of where that word appears in the passage that I used for the WordSift .  This is a great way to identify different ways a certain word was used.  

This would be great for all subject areas by allowing students to visualize and see the words they are discussing, whether high school students analyzing a piece of work written by someone else or first graders brainstorming what they think is happening in a picture.  WordSift was created for teachers and their site includes ideas for more ways of using their tool in the classroom.  

Word Stash - a flashcard dictionary

Check out this online dictionary called WordStash, which has an interface providing a feel of flashcards. To begin, look up a word and read the definition.

To obtain the most for this tool, create an account. A Teacher account will allow you to create lists of words you can publish for your students. Teachers will have the ability to create a class, and allow students in that class easy access to the lists and terms available to study. A Student account must be linked to an email address. Students will also have the ability to create lists of words which they can share publicly or keep private.

When creating a list of terms, you have the option of choosing a WordStash definition, or typing your own. Popular activities inside Word Stash include Learning Mode, Practice Mode, Play Match Game, and Quiz me.

Follow Wordstash updates on their blog at http://wordstash.tumblr.com/. Try it out, as this site could be a great enhancement for your vocabulary resources.