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Our free Text Readability Consensus Calculator takes a sample of your writing and calculates the number of sentences, words, syllables, and characters in your sample. Our program takes the output of these numbers and plugs them into 7 popular readability formulas. These 7 readability formulas (see below) will help you find out the reading level and grade level of your materials and help you to determine if your audience can read your materials.

CommonLit organizes the content on its site by theme. Teachers search for a theme related to what they are teaching (e.g. fear, resilience, love or greed). Once they've selected a theme, they can view the texts that have been paired with that theme at a range of reading levels from elementary into high school. The texts include everything from famous speeches, historical documents, news articles to poems and stories.

The Smithsonian Tween Tribune is a free resource for teachers and students. It has a huge collection of articles written at various Lexile levels. The articles also come with a quiz to assess comprehension and students can post a comment about what they read.

Rewordify is a free site that was developed by a special education teacher and former computer programmer for the purpose of helping students read complex passages. At its most basic level Rewordify takes a complex passage and rephrases it in simpler terms. Students can adjust Rewordify's settings to match their needs. For example, students can add words to a "skip list" and those words will not be changed when they appear in a passage. Students can also use Rewordify to simply highlight difficult words instead of having them replaced.

Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories, presentations, reports, or tutorials you and your students make to share, read, and print. Storybird is a fun, collaborative website that can be integrated in all content areas and at all grade levels. For Resources see: http://clifmims.com/site/resources-from-storybird-hands-on-workshop-at-msmeca13/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+clifsnotes+%28Clif%27s+Notes%29

Share this French and Spanish teachers. We are having a difficult time finding informational texts that are age appropriate while being skill level appropriate with content that is engaging and interesting in the target languages. This could be a great way to solicit materials/resources in the target language. Also, it is a great way for our students to connect globally with an authentic audience!