October 5, 2014

FREE Online Sources of Leveled, Non-Fiction Text!

Marn Frank, Literacy & STAR Coordinator

Both GED 2014® and College & Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education (CCRS) recommend using mostly non-fiction or expository text rather than fiction or narrative text for language, reading, and writing instruction. Fortunately, there are several websites offering a variety of free, leveled, non-fiction text appropriate for use with adult readers:

Britannica School offers a wide variety of science and social studies text at Reading Level 1=elementary (or Beginning), Level 2=middle (or Intermediate), and Level 3= high (or Secondary). The reading levels can be changed at any time.

  • Go to http://school.eb.com.proxy.elm4you.org/
  • Scroll to the desired level of reading (elementary, middle, high)
  • Search for topical articles on people, places, or things
  • Click on the desired topic match to open the article
  • There are also images, videos, and a read aloud option with guided sentence highlighting.

The Center for the Study of Adult Literacy (CSAL) has organized an electronic library of over 1600 texts at grade levels 3.0-7.9. All have been reviewed by the CSAL team.

  • Go to http://csal.gsu.edu/content/library
  • Click on Teachers for information on the library, text levels (easier, medium, harder), subject topics, copyright, and use with students
  • Click on Adult Learners to select the text level and subject topic and view a sample web page
  • For each subject topic, there are many story titles listed in alphabetical order (some are from Marshall Adult Education’s Reading for Today’s Adults!)

These resources are just two of many posted on the Reading resource library on the ATLAS website, so take a look around!

Marn Frank, Literacy & STAR Coordinator ATLAS

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