The Teachers’ Domain self-paced student lessons for adolescent literacy, funded by the Walmart Middle School Literacy Initiative, make their debut at this year’s National Council for Teachers of English conference in Chicago. These self-paced lessons align with the Common Core standards that emphasize teaching literacy skills through content and are designed to enhance the literacy skills of struggling 5^th – 8^th grade readers.

Each lesson contains 10 – 12 screens in which students read, view videos, complete an interactive activity, and write to learn about an engaging science or history topic.  Resources can be searched by content area or key literary strategies such as determining important information, sequencing events, and understanding problem/solution.

In the self-paced literacy lesson Solving a Public Health Problem, for example, students watch videos about a real-life disease outbreak in New York City and learn about the step-by-step process public health workers use in investigating the cause of similar outbreaks.  Exploring a science focus on public health, they read informational text, learn and practice vocabulary words, and explore content through videos and interactive activities. When finished, students select and complete a writing assignment offline.