Blog #10 Readworks

Readworks 

Readworks is a website that is driven by cognitive science research to enhance student reading comprehension and curricular supports to solve the student reading crisis and close the student achievement gap for grades from kindergarten to 12th grade. I heard about Read-works from my mentor teacher because she uses it daily for her fourth-grade students to learn something new and practice their comprehension skills. Teachers can assign or give students specific lessons that have a certain topic where they read a part of a text and have comprehension questions that follow. 

Eaze of Use/ Accessibility 

There are over 1.4 million teachers using Read works and over 17 million students benefitting from it currently. It is a completely free resource and very easy to use because of it’s organization and guides on how to enhance learning and integrate readworks in it. You can push “find content” and on the left-hand side choose what kind of text you want like an article a day, a boost read to help differentiate, collections for ELLs, e-books, and human voice audio. This site is big on differentiation because part of its core mission is to bridge the gap of students who don't understand reading material well. You can then choose from the type of activity you want the students to do and how many questions. Then you can choose the grade level it is aimed for along with the topic of either social studies, art, or science, and the text type as either fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. There is an entire page on their website that contains many guides for teachers to instruct them on how to best use readworks for their students. There is automatic grading and the teacher gets to see the results for each students to assess how well they are at the comprehension in that activity. 

Experience

My mentor teacher uses this every day for her fourth-grade students. She has a nonfiction article of the day for students to read and complete that only takes about 10 minutes. It is such a helpful tool because not only does it help the students practice comprehension skills, but they also get to learn something new, and the students really enjoy doing it. My mentor teacher will assign 3-5 readworks articles to the google classroom and students get to pick the topics they want to learn about. It shows the teacher how each student did and the current progress while they are doing it. Students can highlight and annotate the text to help them, as well. When I teach a class I am definitely using this website because it is easy, free, quick, and effective.

Connections to the Class

This technology tool connects really well to the 5th step in the 7 events of instruction. It acts as a tool for students to have guided practice to help them Elicit the Desired behavior. As students practice reading and answering questions, they will become better and better at comprehending texts. 

Sites used: ReadWorks