Complex Texts for Teaching and Assessing the State Standards: Literary Texts – Grades 6-8 Workbook

This collection of texts, strategically aligned with each Common Core State Standard, takes the national rhetoric regarding informational text complexity and makes it actionable, observable, and replicable.

The Common Core State Standards place a strong emphasis on the role of text complexity in evaluating student readiness for college and careers. Aligned with that expectation, this set of texts guarantees that each child, regardless of ability and past performance is exposed, daily, to increasing levels of text complexity with considerations made for quantitative, qualitative, and reader & task measures.

In addition to promoting engagement in careful, sustained interpretation of a variety of texts (across mediums, topics, and genres), these texts diminish teacher planning time (which would otherwise be consumed with locating appropriate texts) and guarantees that students are exposed to reading processes with a greater emphasis on the particular over the general with strategic attention to individual words; syntax; intended meaning; and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read.