Common Core Resources

Last week, I had the privelege of attending a very informative presentation on the coming Common Core Standards by Jennifer Maurer, School Library Consultant with the Oregon State Library. She passed on some valuable resources that not only help librarians who do non-fiction collection development like me, but also educators and school librarians / media assistants.

http://www.ode.state.or.us/search/page/?id=2860
The Common Core Standards homepage from the Oregon Department of Education has a full implementation toolkit for educators and students.

http://www.ode.state.or.us/search/page/?id=3741
Information about Common Core & special needs students.

http://secondary.educator.oslis.org/find-information
Databases and Common Core Standards - Databases can be overwhelming to students and even educators. Check the bottom of the page for a handy document with information about when to use a particular K-12 Gale database.

http://criticalthinkingworks.com/?p=406
This blog post on Common Core and informational text does a concise job of summing up the way that Common Core shifts from balanced literacy in early grades to a greater emphasis on informational texts in the upper grades. "Ultimately, we need to develop classroom instruction that brings together information and ideas from wide-ranging sources, helping students develop deep and interconnected knowledge."

http://www.lexile.com/about-lexile/lexile-overview/
Now is a great time to begin understanding Lexile framework scores to measure the difficulty of a text and a student's reading proficiency, which is scored on the reading portion of the OAKs test. Lexile scores should are not the be-all and end-all, but it is a popular tool for selecting appropriate texts.