Editor’s note: This article is part of the series The Right Tool for the Job: Improving Reading and Writing in the Classroom that provides in-depth reviews of several promising digital tools for English language arts classrooms.
It’s October and you’re finally settling in to the school year. You’ve gotten to know your students, assessed their reading levels, and planned diligently for instruction. Now you just need the right tools—more specifically, a range of text that can meet their needs. Enter Curriculet.
Curriculet is an online digital library of books and news articles intended to be used as independent reading to supplement any curriculum. According to its website, “More than 1,000,000 students and teachers in 10,000 schools love to learn and read on Curriculet,” and its resources are accessible on all devices. With books and articles geared toward grades 3–12, Curriculet strengthens a classroom library by offering online books and texts that teachers can individually or collectively assign to students. (Note: Curriculet was recently acquired by the Waterford Research Institute, a nonprofit edtech and research center. While all resources are still currently available, future plans for the site are forthcoming.)
Curriculet’s website has a clean and professional feel, with colorful photographs and a brief introductory video explaining the site’s purpose and content. Its partners include well-known book and textbook publishers, such as Simon and Schuster and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Although texts are available in a wide variety of genres, both fiction and nonfiction, the library includes mostly narrative books. Free and paid texts are available. There is also an option of subscribing to USA Today for nonfiction news articles (teachers can request a forty-five-day free trial for this option).
Curriculet includes both reading content and student-assessment capabilities. Once a teacher has assigned a text, students are provided interactive “checkpoints” as they move through it, which helps keep them engaged as they read. Some contain content-specific multiple-choice questions where students receive instant feedback on whether their answers are right or wrong (what the site calls “in-the-moment feedback”). Others are comprised of free-response questions or annotations with additional content, photos, videos, and reading tips. For example, in the book The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate, the author makes reference to a “mighty silverback,” and when students click on the photo icon, they receive an explanation of a silverback gorilla. At the end of each text, students take a quiz covering what they’ve read. Teachers receive their quiz scores and free-response answers, along with reports including time read, percentage of text completed, and the number of books and news stories read. Each text and all its associated curriculum is called a curriculet.
Helpfully for many educators, this program is intended to align with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Content-specific questions accompanying each text (both multiple choice and open response) are cross-referenced with the standards they cover. For example, if I assign a student to read Holes by Louis Sachar, she will be asked to identify the point of view of the story, aligned with CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.6, which requires that students describe characters, settings, or events using evidence from the text.
One significant weakness is the store’s search feature, which does not allow users to select texts based on Lexile level or interest outside of basic categories such as new releases, poetry, children’s literature, and historical fiction. Despite this limitation, however, Curriculet is a helpful resources for teachers looking for reputable reading texts and accompanying assessments that can be used for either individual students or small groups, depending on reading level and need. For a closer look at Curriculet’s resources, the site’s usefulness to classroom teachers, and key strengths and areas of improvement, please click here.
Melody Arabo is a third-grade teacher in Michigan, a National Education Association (NEA) Master Teacher, a Michigan Educator Voice Fellow, the 2015 Michigan Teacher of the Year, and a 2016 Teaching Ambassador Fellow for the U.S. Department of Education.