When I spent time this spring looking deeper at the Common Core Reading standards, a few things stood out for me. First, reading is bigger than reading books. It also includes reading digital text. These words are actually in the Common Core. I also began to realize that many, many websites could constitute or be categorized as informational text. I researched that idea a bit and this is what I came up with: http://lablinks.weebly.com/informational-text.htmlThen, in talking with my Reading Specialist friend, she stated that while such sites are definitely good for informational text reading, it is important that kids be reading at their level. Yikes! These sites don't come leveled, like our classroom books. Then, we both simultaneously found this cool tool that determines readability of websites. This tool, http://www.read-able.com/bookmarklet.html, determines a sites's readability by number of words, sentences, and number of syllables in words. While not as complex as we may use in the classroom, it is definitely something. Give it a try! I think it is a great tool to help kids and teachers find sites that are within a student's readability ballpark.
Tell me what you think about the Readability tool or if you have any other sites that you think we could add to our Informational Text collection..... Comment now!
