Join over one million educators using ReadWorks to improve students’ reading comprehension skills.
Use content (Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry) written by experts and curated by educators – topics you’re teaching and topics worth knowing from “How do scrapes heal“, through “The Legend of the Pharaoh’s Curse” to “Visual art“.1https://www.readworks.org/our-solutions As said on the ReadWorks facebook page, it “provides research-based units, lessons, and authentic, leveled non-fiction and literary passages directly to educators online, for free, to be shared broadly”.2https://www.facebook.com/pg/ReadWorks/about/?ref=page_internal Although originally designed as a reading comprehension bank for for grades K-12 (American), the materials can be used with other groups ages as well, especially in the area of ESOL (up to level 5).
Content
The content, grouped in Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry, covers areas such as Science, Literary or Skill and strategies. A couple of examples of what might be useful for ESOL learners: Environment – Your recycled house; Social Studies – China’s Terracotta Army; Compare and contrast – Fuels of the future.
Search option
Text options: can search the material by topic; you can explore over 1000’s of nonfiction & fiction passages each with an audion, a questions set, vocabulary and activities, some also with step reading and e-books.
Paired Text: if text related to the same topic/area are paired and come with a set of questions based on both. For example, Technology and inventions activity is based on “The Origin of the Internet” and “A Bad Robot”. There are 7 descriptive questions 2 of which are based on the 1st text, 2 following on the 2nd text. There are two more questions comparing and contrasting both texts, and, finally, the last question involving analysing both texts.
Grade: K – 12 (primary to secondary school level up to level 4)
Stepreads: excellent for differentiation, less complex versions of the original text. SR2 is a simpler version of SR1. For example, The Code of Hammurabi consists of 3 levels of the same text – the original, SR1 and SR2. See how you can set up Stepreads here.
E-books: articles based on the original texts, full of wonderful illustrations and enriched with an expressive human voice. A real gem. This link will take you to an e-book based on Hong Kong’s bun festival.
If you are not a fan of a synthesized voice (Polly), you can tick a Human-voice Audio option to have texts read aloud by rel humans. Listen to City Rights on a City Bus (an article about Rosa Parks) read by a human and an article about Andrew Carnegie read by Polly.
The original purpose of creating ReadWorks was fighting “our nation’s (America’s) reading comprehension crisis and closing the achievement gap”3https://www.facebook.com/pg/ReadWorks/about/?ref=page_internal One of my favourite feature of the website is Article-A-Day which fights the reading crisis by expanding students’ background knowledge, building up vocabulary and developing reading habit (reading stamina). 4https://about.readworks.org/article-a-day-routine.html Basically speaking, you assign an article to a student/group of students. the whole class with a date it is due. Students submit the tasks and the program displays the progress.. From the image below you will see that, although the article about Colombian food is due for 8 May, some students have already submitted their tasks. Watch a video about Article-A-Day option here.
You can set up a class in no time. You can do it either by the Google sign-in (for students who have gmail accounts) or via Roster (a list of students created by you: see how to do it here). Your students will need to set up their accounts and activate them with a code generated specifically for your class by the program. They will see all assigned reading tasks assigned to them with a date due. You can assign tasks to the whole class, groups or specific students.
This is how you can assign reading tasks.
There is a print option and you can choose what you want to print – just a text; a text with/without answers etc.
Click here how Vocabulary section works.
Reading comprehension activities involve multiple choice tests as well as answerig open questions with more descriptive answers, for example short paragraphs. Teachers can easily grade them and give feedback. See how – click this link.
Students can: unpin the audio pin to make it float; make the fonts bigger; use the readability ruler; split the screen to see the passage and the questions simultanously; highlight the text and make comments/notes.
Watch the video showing the above:
Summer reading – you will find reading packs for your students for summer holidays. All with questions and answers. In pdf. Click here. Below, example of summer readings for grade 8.
So, use ReadWorks because it …. works!
