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compare and contrast Fifth Grade (Michele and Jennifer

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compare and contrast Fifth Grade (Michele and Jennifer

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Literacy Trekker

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Cheryl Montolio And KAtie McCormick updated

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Cheryl Montolio And KAtie McCormick updated

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2- Choice Assignment-Assessment template (1)

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2- Literacy Trekker- template - Jamestown

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Stephanie Resto- Chrysanthemum Literacy Trekker

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2- Literacy Trekker- Cheryl Montolio Katie McCormick

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Bridget

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A Place Called Home Literacy Trekker

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States of Matter Reading Passage

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Ericka Jenkins

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States of Matter

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Top 6 websites offering free leveled reading

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Top 6 websites offering free leveled reading

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Our Education Blogger is a public school teacher with over a decade of experience. She's an active NEA member and enjoys writing about her experiences in the classroom.
Struggling to find quality, leveled reading passages for your students? Look no further! We're sharing our favorite websites that offer free, high-quality, leveled reading passages.
CommonLit.org
CommonLit delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 5-12. Our resources are flexible, research-based, aligned to the Common Core State Standards, created by teachers for teachers. We believe in the transformative power of a great text, and a great question.

ReadWorks.org
The nonprofit ReadWorks provides K-12 teachers with what to teach and how to teach it-online, for free, to be shared broadly. We provide the largest, highest-quality library of curated nonfiction and literary articles in the country, along with reading comprehension and vocabulary lessons, formative assessments, and teacher guidance. Most importantly, everything ReadWorks does is based on proven cognitive science research, not unproven academic theory.
ReadingVine.com

Free grade leveled reading passages for use in the classroom or at home. Filter by genre, grade, topic, skill, and more.
K5Learning.com
Free reading comprehension worksheets for grades 1-5. Use these free, printable worksheets to practice and improve reading comprehension, vocabulary and writing. Each reading passage is followed by exercises which for younger students focus on recalling information directly from the text and for older students focus on prediction, inference and character traits.
LearnZillion.com
Browse 5-day close reading modules, as well as text-based reading and writing skill videos, for free!
TweenTribune.com
A free teacher tool from Smithsonian Teacher, offering daily AP news articles, Lexile® leveled for K-12, self-scoring quizzes customized by Lexile® level, critical thinking questions, student commenting, Espanol AP articles, weekly lesson plans, weekly video, and weekend "Monday Morning Ready" newsletter as prep for the week ahead.

Have a reading passage, but aren't sure what its Lexile level is? Try Lexile Analyzer to evaluate any passage. Registered educators (it's free for you!) have a 1,000 word limit.

We'd love to hear from you! In the comment section below, let us know your favorite sites to find leveled reading passages

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Top 6 Websites Offering Free Leveled Reading Passages - California Casualty

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Our Education Blogger is a public school teacher with over a decade of experience. She's an active NEA member and enjoys writing about her experiences in the classroom. Struggling to find quality, leveled reading passages for your students? Look no further! We're sharing our favorite websites that offer free, high-quality, leveled reading passages.

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

Coming soon! UDL Guidelines 3.0

The UDL Guidelines are a living, dynamic tool that is continuously developed based on new research and feedback from practitioners. In 2020, CAST launched our most recent effort to update the UDL Guidelines, with a specific focus on equity. There has been a strong call from the field-both practitioners and researchers alike-to more fully develop the Guidelines to address critical barriers rooted in biases and systems of oppression. The current update aims to respond to this call and to work toward fulfilling the promise of the Guidelines as a tool to guide the design of learning environments that more fully honor and value every learner.

Since our launch in 2020, we have been committed to a community-driven, inclusive, and transparent updating process. As part of this effort, we are:

Collaborating with an Advisory Board, a UDL Guidelines Collaborative, and a Young Adult Advisory Board to guide our work

Conducting focus groups with a diversity of participants to learn from their perspectives, lived experiences, and feedback

Reviewing the research on the UDL Guidelines research pages to understand the balance of different research fields, methodological approaches, epistemological approaches, and author positionalities

Conducting literature reviews of equity-oriented research that connect to and extend the Guidelines, such as disability studies and critical pedagogy studies

We are excited to share this next iteration of the UDL Guidelines in 2024. If you are interested in receiving our UDL Guidelines 3.0 newsletter to stay updated on our progress and to share your ideas and perspectives, please complete this brief form.

Review the Summary

Explore the Full Draft

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST.

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Not free any more

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It's time to improve literacy skills during social studies instruction and ensure that readers of all abilities have what they need to access grade-level social studies concepts.

Join us on Thursday, December 7 for a look at scaffolded materials that provide extra literacy support while building key social studies concepts and skills.

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Newsela | Content and assessment platform

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Content Aligned To National & State Standard, Flexible To Support Relevant Curriculum. Find the Perfect Piece Of Content For Lessons. Go beyond the book.

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2- Literacy Trekker on the effects of colonial settlement on Native American populations

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Article to accompany Literacy trekker on colonial settlement on Native American population

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Article to accompany Literacy trekker on colonial settlement on Native American population

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2- Effects of colonial settlement on Native American populations

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Choice Assessment

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Bridget

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A Place to Call Home Choice Assessment

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Stephanie Resto- Retelling Choice Assignment

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Crystal and Denise

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A format that provides students with personalized feedback and works to keep them from focusing solely on their grade.

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How to Create a Rubric: Introduction

Perhaps you have never even thought about the care it takes to create a rubric. Perhaps you have never even heard of a rubric and its usage in education, in which case, you should take a peek at this article: "What is a rubric?" Basically, this tool that teachers and professors use to help them communicate expectations, provide focused feedback, and grade products, can be invaluable when the correct answer is not as cut and dried as Choice A on a multiple choice test. But creating a great rubric is more than just slapping some expectations on a paper, assigning some percentage points, and calling it a day. A good rubric needs to be designed with care and precision in order to truly help teachers distribute and receive the expected work.

Steps to Create a Rubric

The following six steps will help you when you decide to use a rubric for assessing an essay, a project, group work, or any other task that does not have a clear right or wrong answer.

Before you can create a rubric, you need to decide the type of rubric you'd like to use, and that will largely be determined by your goals for the assessment.

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. How detailed do I want my feedback to be?

2. How will I break down my expectations for this project?

3. Are all of the tasks equally important?

4. How do I want to assess performance?

5. What standards must the students hit in order to achieve acceptable or exceptional performance?

6. Do I want to give one final grade on the project or a cluster of smaller grades based on several criteria?

7. Am I grading based on the work or on participation? Am I grading on both?

Once you've figured out how detailed you'd like the rubric to be and the goals you are trying to reach, you can choose a type of rubric.

Step 2: Choose a Rubric Type

Although there are many variations of rubrics, it can be helpful to at least have a standard set to help you decide where to start. Here are two that are widely used in teaching as defined by DePaul University's Graduate Educational department:

1. Analytic Rubric: This is the standard grid rubric that many teachers routinely use to assess students' work. This is the optimal rubric for providing clear, detailed feedback. With an analytic rubric, criteria for the students' work is listed in the left column and performance levels are listed across the top. The squares inside the grid will typically contain the specs for each level. A rubric for an essay, for example, might contain criteria like "Organization, Support, and Focus," and may contain performance levels like "(4) Exceptional, (3) Satisfactory, (2) Developing, and (1) Unsatisfactory."​ The performance levels are typically given percentage points or letter grades and a final grade is typically calculated at the end. The scoring rubrics for the ACT and SAT are designed this way, although when students take them, they will receive a holistic score.

2. Holistic Rubric: This is the type of rubric that is much easier to create, but much more difficult to use accurately. Typically, a teacher provides a series of letter grades or a range of numbers (1-4 or 1-6, for example) and then assigns expectations for each of those scores. When grading, the teacher matches the student work in its entirety to a single description on the scale. This is useful for grading multiple essays, but it does not leave room for detailed feedback on student work.

Step 3: Determine Your Criteria

This is where the learning objectives for your unit or course come into play. Here, you'll need to brainstorm a list of knowledge and skills you would like to assess for the project. Group them according to similarities and get rid of anything that is not absolutely critical. A rubric with too much criteria is difficult to use! Try to stick with 4-7 specific subjects for which you'll be able to create unambiguous, measurable expectations in the performance levels. You'll want to be able to spot the criteria quickly while grading and be able to explain them quickly when instructing your students. In an analytic rubric, the criteria are typically listed along the left column.

Step 4: Create Your Performance Levels

Once you have determined the broad levels you would like students to demonstrate mastery of, you will need to figure out what type of scores you will assign based on each level of mastery. Most ratings scales include between three and five levels. Some teachers use a combination of numbers and descriptive labels like "(4) Exceptional, (3) Satisfactory, etc." while other teachers simply assign numbers, percentages, letter grades or any combination of the three for each level. You can arrange them from highest to lowest or lowest to highest as long as your levels are organized and easy to understand.

Step 5: Write Descriptors for Each Level of Your Rubric

This is probably your most difficult step in creating a rubric.Here, you will need to write short statements of your expectations underneath each performance level for every single criteria. The descriptions should be specific and measurable. The language should be parallel to help with student comprehension and the degree to which the standards are met should be explained.

Again, to use an analytic essay rubric as an example, if your criteria was "Organization" and you used the (4) Exceptional, (3) Satisfactory, (2) Developing, and (1) Unsatisfactory scale, you would need to write the specific content a student would need to produce to meet each level. It could look something like this:

Organization
Organization is coherent, unified, and effective in support of the paper's purpose and
consistently demonstrates
effective and appropriate
transitions
between ideas and paragraphs.

Organization is coherent and unified in support of the paper's purpose and usually demonstrates effective and appropriate transitions between ideas and paragraphs.

Organization is coherent in
support of the essay's purpose, but is ineffective at times and may demonstrate abrupt or weak transitions between ideas or paragraphs.

Organization is confused and fragmented. It does not support the essay's purpose and demonstrates a
lack of structure or coherence that negatively
affects readability.

A holistic rubric would not break down the essay's grading criteria with such precision. The top two tiers of a holistic essay rubric would look more like this:

6 = Essay demonstrates excellent composition skills including a clear and thought-provoking thesis, appropriate and effective organization, lively and convincing supporting materials, effective diction and sentence skills, and perfect or near perfect mechanics including spelling and punctuation. The writing perfectly accomplishes the objectives of the assignment.

5 = Essay contains strong composition skills including a clear and thought-provoking thesis, but development, diction, and sentence style may suffer minor flaws. The essay shows careful and acceptable use of mechanics. The writing effectively accomplishes the goals of the assignment.

Step 6: Revise Your Rubric

After creating the descriptive language for all of the levels (making sure it is parallel, specific and measurable), you need to go back through and limit your rubric to a single page. Too many parameters will be difficult to assess at once, and may be an ineffective way to assess students' mastery of a specific standard. Consider the effectiveness of the rubric, asking for student understanding and co-teacher feedback before moving forward. Do not be afraid to revise as necessary. It may even be helpful to grade a sample project in order to gauge the effectiveness of your rubric. You can always adjust the rubric if need be before handing it out, but once it's distributed, it will be difficult to retract.

Teacher Resources:

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Wondering how to create a rubric for your classroom? Check out the six steps you need to design an effective rubric to assess your students' next essay or project.

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2- Impact of Colonization- Choice Assessment

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

Coming soon! UDL Guidelines 3.0

The UDL Guidelines are a living, dynamic tool that is continuously developed based on new research and feedback from practitioners. In 2020, CAST launched our most recent effort to update the UDL Guidelines, with a specific focus on equity. There has been a strong call from the field-both practitioners and researchers alike-to more fully develop the Guidelines to address critical barriers rooted in biases and systems of oppression. The current update aims to respond to this call and to work toward fulfilling the promise of the Guidelines as a tool to guide the design of learning environments that more fully honor and value every learner.

Since our launch in 2020, we have been committed to a community-driven, inclusive, and transparent updating process. As part of this effort, we are:

Collaborating with an Advisory Board, a UDL Guidelines Collaborative, and a Young Adult Advisory Board to guide our work

Conducting focus groups with a diversity of participants to learn from their perspectives, lived experiences, and feedback

Reviewing the research on the UDL Guidelines research pages to understand the balance of different research fields, methodological approaches, epistemological approaches, and author positionalities

Conducting literature reviews of equity-oriented research that connect to and extend the Guidelines, such as disability studies and critical pedagogy studies

We are excited to share this next iteration of the UDL Guidelines in 2024. If you are interested in receiving our UDL Guidelines 3.0 newsletter to stay updated on our progress and to share your ideas and perspectives, please complete this brief form.

Review the Summary

Explore the Full Draft

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST.

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Saxon

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Mr. Long

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1- Scaffolded Reading homework- Literacy Trekker

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Ericka Jenkins’ elevator description of the 3 Essential Ingredients of UDL. 

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Ericka Jenkins’ elevator description of the 3 Essential Ingredients of UDL. 

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Assessment

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Saxon

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The 3 essential UDL ingredients are goals, variability, and context. Goals need to be flexible in order to engage your students...

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Cheryl Montolio 3 essential UDL ingredients 

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Cheryl Montolio 3 essential UDL ingredients 

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Goals are clear, precise and student friendly. Variability provides options, engagement, the why, the what and the how. Context is it alterable? Is it relevant? Change the context not the student.

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Poem/Rap:
UDL is not a disease! It is a successful teaching recipe.  It has 3 ingredients: goals, context and variability. Each item is unique but is a substantial necessity!
One has to be clear to stay on track.  Change your context, that's a fact!
Variability 1,2,3 we are all different, can't you see???!!!!

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Engagement - ( Recruiting interest, sustaining effort & persistence, self regulation)
+ Representation -
( Perception, Lang & symbols, Comprehension),
+ Action and Expression - (physical action, expression & communication, executive functions)
= EXPERT LEARNERS WHO ARE Purposeful & motivated, resourceful and knowledgeable, strategic and goal -directed.

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3 essential UDL ingredients are goals, variability and context. Goals are what the students are to accomplish and must be clear and student friendly. Variability among students is to be expected. Intentionally plan for variability in students. The third is context, is the learning environment. Change the environment and not the student

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The 3 essential ingredients of UDL are: goals, which need to be clear; variability, which we need to intentionally plan for; and context, which we need to change rather than trying to change the student.

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The 3 essential ingredients of Universal Design for Learning are: Goals, variability, and context. The first, goals, is based on students understanding a clear and relevant goal with student-friendly language. The second, variability, has to be intentional and provide means of engagement, representation, and action and expression. The third, context, is based on the learning environment and you have to ask yourself, is it alterable? Is it relevant? If so change the context not the student.

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The three essential ingredients are goals, variability, and context. It is important to plan with engagement, representation and action/expression in mind focusing on the learning environment, and essential for some, but accessible for all.

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3 Essential Ingredients:
Goals - Are my goals clear? Variability is the rule, not the exception - engagement, representation, and action / expression.  Context - the learning environment. Necessary for some, usable by all.

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3 Essential UDL Ingredients
Are my goals clear? Am I intentionally planning for the variability in my class? How can I change the context not my students?

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3 Essential UDL ingredients Melissa Mayor

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3 Essential UDL ingredients Melissa Mayor

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Goals: clear goals include student friendly and attainable. Why work on something you don’t understand or can’t obtain. Variability: access for all, so everyone achieves. Am I planning for success? Context: make curriculum, assessments, methods and materials optimal for student success. Focus on what we can change and do it!

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The UDL essential ingredients: goals, variability, and context. Goals are the “what, why, and how.” Variability provides options and is the norm not the exception. Context: curriculum, assessments, and materials.

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The 3 essential ingredients are : goals, variability and context. Goals need to be clear and concise. It is crucial to engage your students. Variability needs to be intentional and provide different options to learn. Key questions to ask yourself when planning for variability are " is it alterable? and is it relevant?". Lastly, context is usually stuff given to you from the district and you should ask yourself "how can I change the context without changing the student".

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I work for the Florida Inclusion Network and support districts, schools, and families with inclusion. In my spare time I enjoy playing pickleball.

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I work for FDLRS Action. I love spending time with my family and reading books.