A “Knotty” Problem
Ever have a problem like this? Yes, where to begin. I was talking with another teacher the other day about books for the upcoming year and it got me thinking. I remembered that another teacher had used Alice in Wonderland last year. I also remembered that it was one of the exemplar texts in Appendix B of the CCSS. So, I started there. Not so easy, there are very few exemplar texts, one reason I came upon was that it would have been prohibitively costly for the writers of the CCSS to gain the necessary permissions for a large body of texts. As I dug deeper, or in this case dove further into the untangling, I discovered that the choosing of text fell under the heading of “Text Complexity”; complexity an appropriate word. What you have here are the fruits of those labors thus far. I do hope you find these resources helpful. If you should happen to run across any other helpful resources, please share and I will post them here.
Think Aloud’s; Unpacking Standards
Tech Tools to Aid in Measuring Text Complexity
Text Matters—7 Actions That Teachers Can Take Right Now: Text Complexity New Research on Multiple Measures of Text Complexity (has a nice chart)