A Text Set is a literacy resource that can enhance comprehension by targeting diverse learners. Often textbooks can be either too difficult or too easy for students. Offering different literacy resources such as magazines, articles, short stories, resource books and even picture books is a great way to get students interested in the topics being taught. Text sets can enhance background knowledge as well as allow a teacher to differentiate materials for different learners. Newspaper articles and primary sources are an easy way to incorporate text sets into the social studies curriculum. Titlewave.com and Instgrok.com are two web resources that list literacy resources for social studies classrooms. For differentiating purposes lexile.com and readability-score.com give you the ability to determine the reading level of different reading materials. Having a range of two years below through two years above your students age is a good rule of thumb while collecting text set materials. I will definitely supply my class with different text sets throughout units and encourage them to find their own as well. I will use different activities throughout the lesson so students are actively engaged in creating their own knowledge.
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