As we’re enjoying the summer months, August is quickly approaching, and with it the new school year. As educators start to plan, Cascade Reading is here to help! All of these tools and resources, available in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian, are completely free – all you need to do is sign up for an account with your email!
If you’re looking for supplemental readings for your students, look no further than the Cascade Passage Library. We constructed 195 sets of unique passages, each with a set of different grade levels ranging from 2nd to 8th grade, to correspond to 4th and 5th grade CKLA units. Each passage is written in the Cascade Format, and it can easily be integrated automatically into the Cascade Reader View, Cascade Explorer View, or shared as an HTML/PDF file. We also provide a set of 10+ comprehension questions for every passage set at each grade level, allowing teachers to track comprehension as they see fit. This library contains enough passages for a student to read a completely new passage every day of the school year, so check it out today!
If you want to take text from your computer and transform it into a format that is easier for your students to understand, check out the Cascade Reader View! Here, you can automatically transform any length of text into the Cascade Format and then copy or save as PDF to share with your students.
Similar to the Cascade Reader View, the Explorer View not only allows you to transform any text into the Cascade Format and share with your students, but it also offers additional visualization tools that can help students understand and learn grammar. For instance, you could highlight certain syntactic groups, parts of speech, and even automatically colorize clauses or collapse and expand sentences based on their structure. This is a must-use tool for grammar lessons!
With this tool, available for free download on all Chromebooks and laptop computers with access to the Chrome store, you can automatically transform the text on any webpage into the Cascade Format with the click of a button. Not only will this help students with their reading, but it also removes distracting images and ads that may interfere with your student’s attention. Students can also revert back to traditional text at any time, giving them the power to use it when they need the additional support! See below for an example educational website on the left followed by what it looks like after using the Web View on the right!
These tools have been used for a few years by educators across the United States – check out last month’s blog for amazing testimonials from our user feedback study. If you’re a second language teacher, check out our earlier results from an intermediate Spanish course. Wherever there’s reading, Cascade Reading can help!
If you’re a reader, parent, or teacher who has been using Cascade Reading, we’d love to hear from you! Click here to let us know what you think!
