by Michele Landis and Dr. Jack Dempsey
Our reading technology is best utilized as a school-wide, integrated tool within any literacy curriculum, so students can leverage Cascaded Text whenever they need the support. As teachers across the nation have already discovered, the new Cascade Format offers an alternative to the centuries-old block text to improve reading comprehension for students of all ages and language backgrounds. If your school’s E-Learning system hasn’t yet integrated Cascade, you can still use this incredible technology to support your students!
Back in February, we announced the Cascade Passage Library with various leveled passage sets on topics corresponding to 4th and 5th grade CKLA units. Since then, we’ve been hard at work continuing to develop the library with our research scientists Dr. Josh Weirick and Amy Atiles. We are thrilled to announce that we have more than doubled the number of available reading passages and added a new feature as well!
There are now 195 unique passage sets, each with seven different reading levels specified by Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level estimates. That’s enough passages for students to read a new passage matched to their reading ability every single day for an entire school year!
Educators anywhere can sign up for a free account to access the passages and share with their students – Note: the links to the individual passages themselves do not require any sign in to access!
In addition to individual statistics about each passage set, our newest feature is a master list of comprehension questions and answers for every individual passage, allowing teachers to assess their students’ comprehension as they are reading from the Passage Library. Alongside our other resources like the Cascade Explorer View, the Cascade Web View, and our Educator Lessons, we strive to make it easier for teachers to incorporate the Cascade Format into their classroom, unlocking reading potential in all of their students.
Already have a Cascade Account? Click here for direct access to the Passage Library!
We’d love to hear from you if you have used Cascade Reading Products (Reader View, Explorer View & Chrome Browser Extension) or our Passage Library or any of our other offerings in your classroom. Please complete our User Survey by clicking here!
Guidelines for using the Passage Library are provided below, adapted from our February blog post.
Happy reading!
How to Use the Cascade Reading Passage Library
2. When you click on a unit, like 4th grade “The Middle Ages,” you’ll see the available topics listed in alphabetical order. For each passage, there are seven different levels corresponding to student reading ability grade levels, and you can view statistics to understand more about the language used across the different levels by clicking on the Passage Set Statistics CSV download link in each dropdown menu.
Clicking on one of the grade levels then opens up the actual passage, already Cascaded for you. Although students cannot access the passage library itself unless they have an account with CascadeReading.com, the links to the actual passages themselves can be shared directly with students via any LMS. This system is set up to prevent students from changing the grade level of the passages or viewing the answers to comprehension questions.
