Hi Everyone,
ReadWorks, a completely free website designed to support student reading growth, is frequently mentioned as a remote learning resource. Today I want to highlight one of its features for building background knowledge, Article-A-Day. Educators like Dr. Daniel Willingham argue that, “teaching content is teaching reading.” They recommend we use reading materials that teach something about the world to build students’ background knowledge. To that end, ReadWorks developed their Article-A-Day system that provides graded article sets on a variety of topics.
The Article-A-Day sets contain six to nine reading passages about the same topic. For example, the weather and climate set provides seven articles within grade level equivalent 4 about clouds, rain, rainbows, dust storms, and climate groups. Over the course of a week or more, an instructor could assign multiple articles in the set to their class. In so doing, students would become more familiar with weather building their background knowledge for future reading as well as helping them learn science content.
More information about how to use Article-A-Day is found in this video beginning at the 23:15 mark. Also, these resources show how to use ReadWorks for remote, hybrid, or face-to-face learning.
What are you doing to increase your students’ background knowledge to help them become better readers?
How have you used ReadWorks with your students?
Thanks in advance for taking a few minutes to share your thoughts!
Steve Schmidt, Moderator
LINCS Reading and Writing CoP
Comments
I have used ReadWorks with my people, adult English language learners. I have assigned ReadTheory https://readtheory.org/ to my students for independent work. They really like it! The stories are short. the quizzes are helpful, and my students are making real gains.
Another really good reading program is Reading Skills for Today's Adults https://www.readingskills4today.com/. CrowdEd Learning https://www.crowdedlearning.org/ is working on a project that will make available web-based quizzes for each of these stories.
We so appreciate you sharing these resources Jill! I am thrilled to hear your students are making gains through the independent work you assign them.
While I was researching the ReadWorks' Article-A-Day, I found that instructors can get extra support for their English language learners in the following ways:
Best,
Steve Schmidt, Moderator
LINCS Reading and Writing CoP