As a private tutor, I spend quite a bit of my week scouring the internet for new resources and tools that I can use to help my students. If you’ve checked out my Pinterest page, you’ve seen my collection of pins on virtually every topic I’ve been asked by parents and students to explore. Recently, I came up on a gem of a reading tool, ReadWorks© Digital which offers a free (yay!) database of leveled texts to help students across a spectrum of reading comprehension mastery areas. I loved it so much that I immediately set up accounts for all of my students and plan to implement them in many of my lessons over the next few months. However, in the meantime I didn’t to keep this new-found treasure to myself, read on to find out why ReadWorks© Digital is a welcomed resource to spring into reading comprehension this season:
It Features Skills Focused Articles: When parents come to me with help for “reading comprehension” they often aren’t able to tell me exactly what that looks like for their child. Reading comprehension encompasses a broad set of skills that include inferencing, main idea, compare/contrast, sequencing and more. Although as a trained teacher I can assess and identify the areas of skill students are lacking, what I love about ReadWorks© Digital is that it allows teachers to assign articles that focus on specific skills as they assist students in refining them. So, if, for example, I have a student who really needs to improve their ability to identify theme in a story, I can easily find articles and stories that will be beneficial to them in that area.
It’s Leveled to Each Individual Child: In addition to being skill-specific, ReadWorks© Digital also features the ability to assign properly lexile-leveled texts to students in the same class or group. Many similar resources will require teachers to assign the same article with the same number of words to all students in a particular grade or class section, however ReadWorks© Digital allows me to make accommodations for lexile and even adding audio for students who may have dyslexia or other learning differences.
It’s Engaging: Whether fact or fiction-based, this website offers very interesting narrative and expository texts that students love reading. It also includes a wide variety of subjects including those that incorporate science, literature and social studies to provide students with access to cross-curricular topics that they will enjoy reading and learning about!
It’s Paperless: As a parent and tutoring client, you may have noticed that you often amass quite a collection of paper as a result of your child’s assignments. While paper based assignments are not inherently bad, they certainly can add to unnecessary clutter after a while. One of the things I love about ReadWorks© Digital is that students can read, complete assignments and get feedback from me without having to print a single piece of paper. In addition, this platform also includes features like text highlighting and even note taking so that students can add active reading notes all while reading online.
Developing the ability to read and understand texts with confidence is a priority all good educators emphasize and appreciate. Furthermore, as students matriculate through school, they will be expected to digest ever-increasingly complex reading materials in all their subjects including in math and science. To that end, any opportunity I find as your child’s tutor, to help them flourish as young readers is one that I’m excited to take advantage of! To find out more about ReadWorks© Digital, visit their website here.
