Want to add more Non-Fiction reading to your classroom? Try Newsela!

Maybe you're already using it, but a colleague recently told me about a great online source for news and I had to share.  It's called Newsela, and here are a few reasons you might like it:

1. It's full of current and relevant information.  They adapt news stories from a variety of sources (AP, newspapers from around the country).
2. It's accessible to students with different reading skills.  They create different versions of each story at different Lexile levels.  So you can adjust a single story to use simpler or more complex grammar and sentence structure.
3. It's geared toward classrooms.  As a teacher, you can make a free account and add your students.
4. It's Common Core-friendly.  It's a great way to get current, engaging non-fiction to your students.

You can play around on the site and read up to 5 articles before signing up.  Here's an example, note the blue lexile bar on the right.

New Professional Book - Integrating Young Adult Literature Through the Common Core Standards

I just placed an interlibrary loan for an interesting new book at the Oregon State Library. I know that teachers and librarians alike fear fiction and creative writing might fall by the wayside with the adoption of Common Core. I'm eager to see some of the suggestions the authors offer here.

Wadham, Rachel L., and Jonathan W. Ostenson. Integrating Young Adult Literature through the Common Core Standards. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-61069-118-5

This book advocates for a stronger role for young-adult literature in ELA classrooms, compellingly documenting how this body of work meets both the needs of adolescent students and the demands of the common core for complex texts and tasks. The first part of the book addresses the widely adopted common core state standards by examining...

Read more at http://osl-lis.blogspot.com/2013/09/integrating-young-adult-literature.html.

 

Non-Fiction for Teens Booklist

Lindsey Cochran, Beaverton City Library's youth services intern, has just assembled a list of good non-fiction titles for teens.

Download in PDF format

We'll have it up with the rest of the booklists shortly. Feel free to print copies for your classes or interested students! As we prepare for Common Core, I'm always open to suggestions for non-fiction that may be missing from our collection - please send me an e-mail at iduncanson@beavertonoregon.gov if you can recommend titles!

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.