Must Have Mondays: Reading A-Z

I'm so glad for the long weekend - especially right before our last week of school. I had grand plans for how much I was going to get done this weekend. However, I didn't plan on slicing my heel/achilles open and ending up with five stitches. It's been a sore weekend, but I was thankful for the extra recovery day so that I can walk almost normally when I go back to school tomorrow.

Today, I'm linking up with Sabra from Teaching with a Touch of Twang for Must Have Mondays.



What is something I must have in my classroom? A subscription to Reading A-Z. Have you used it in your classroom before? Reading A-Z is a website that you can use to download leveled reading books for your classroom. Their leveled readers go from beginning readers through fifth grade. In addition to being able to download and print the books, each books comes with a lesson plan for guided reading, worksheets, vocabulary words, and a comprehension quiz. I don't often use all of the features, but like that they're available to me.

They also have fluency passages and my favorite - Reader's Theater scripts! My students love readers theater, and it's a great opportunity to practice fluent and expressive reading.

After using it for 5 years, this last week I just found a new feature - you can sort all the books by teaching strategy. I was looking for books that would be good for inferring, so I just sorted by skill, and there was a whole list of books for inferring. They also had all the comprehension strategies, characters, setting, etc. I'm so excited to use that as I plan my guided reading for next year.

If you don't have a huge library of leveled readers or a huge budget to buy them, then Reading A-Z is great. They also have a free 7-day trial that you can try.

It may sound like I'm a spokesperson for them, which I'm not, but I spent my first four years of teaching in a one-room school (yes, they still exist) teaching grades 1-8 in one classroom. We definitely did not have the budget to buy leveled readers for every grade level, so the $80 per year (or so it was at the time) was a huge lifesaver for me. Even though I'm in a different school now with only one grade, it's still my preferred website for guided reading materials.

I hope you had a great long weekend! Enjoy your day back at school. :)