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What are Articles and Stories and how do I assign them to my students?

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Teachers

Freckle's ELA Library contains nonfiction articles and fiction stories that cover a wide variety of high-interest topics and genres. From Biographies, Careers, Science, and Technology to Mystery, Realistic, Historical, and Science Fiction, our text library is guaranteed to provide a range of engaging reading opportunities for all students. Many of the articles go hand in hand with science, social studies, and other topics typically covered in grades K–8.

Each article/story is available at 3 to 5 reading levels, and contains reading comprehension practice and writing prompts for your students at those levels. All of our questions are aligned to specific skills and standards, so teachers can easily target particular learning objectives. In addition, our articles and stories can be filtered by the text level, genre, or standard, as pictured below.

The ELA Articles and Stories page.

Follow these steps to assign an ELA article or story:

  1. Log on to your Teacher Home.
  2. Select ELA in the left navigation bar. Then, select Read articles & stories.
  3. On the right side of the screen, select Assign an article.
  4. You will arrive at Freckle's Article/Story library. You can search the library by scrolling up and down, typing in a keyword, or filtering by text type, skill domain, genre or reading level.

    Each article/story focuses on 2 anchor skill domains throughout, and those are listed below the title once your search has completed. The Freckle reading levels in which the articles are available is shown at the bottom of the article display.
  5. Select the article to preview each leveled text, and the reading comprehension questions and writing prompts that can be presented to students.

    You can switch between reading-level texts with the drop-down list in the upper-left corner of the page.
  6. When ready, select Assign in the upper-middle part of the page. Here you need to make a few selections before the assignment is finalized.

    Select Assignment Type—Select the tasks you would like to assign: just reading and questions or writing.
    The Assign Article page, where you can choose the assignment type.
    Select Grade Level and Select Course—Freckle will default to assigning a student's adaptive level, but you may chose a specific level to assign to students. You will also want to choose the class that contains the students to whom you want to make an assignment.

    The drop-down lists for selecting a grade level and course.

    Select Students—You can select all students or specific students to assign the article. Our system will automatically tell you the adaptive level that best matches each student, and you have another chance to change it if desired. There will be no recommended level for students who have not completed the diagnostic and you cannot assign articles to these students until they have done so.

    The grade recommendation drop-down list is shown for one student. Grade 2.9 is the recommended grade; other grades that can be selected are included in the list.

  7. When all details are selected to match your needs, select Assign at the bottom of the page, and the assignment will appear in the students' inbox. You will be directed to the Assignments page and can also preview progress towards completion.

    The Assign button at the bottom of the page.
    The Assignments page, with the ELA tab selected. The option is chosen to show incomplete assignments; the assignment that was just created is displayed, including the date it was created, the type of assignment, the topic, the number of students it is assigned to, and the progress towards completion. The View Report drop-down list is on the right.If you would like to change the article you have assigned to a student, you can un-assign if they have not started it. On the assignments page, select the arrow to the right of View Report, and then select Add or remove students. You may then select and unselect students of your choosing, and then select Save.

    Add or remove students has been selected in the View Report drop-down list. In the pop-up window, check or uncheck students to assign or un-assign the assignment for those students. The Select All and Deselect All links at the top let you check or uncheck all the students at once. The Cancel and Save buttons are at the bottom.

In addition, Freckle ELA articles are easy to reassign; this can come in handy for students to practice building mastery of a skill with familiar material.

If you are working with the free version of the program, reassigned articles do not count as a another assignment within the same month.

To reassign an article:

  1. Select Reports in the left navigation bar and then select ELA.
  2. Select Article & Story Activity. This will show you how many students completed each article assigned.
  3. Select View Details for the desired article. This will show you the details of the article and the student's responses to the comprehension questions.
  4. In the upper-right part of the screen, select Reassign. This will take you to the Assignment page; follow the instructions above to continue assigning the article.

No assignments are ever deleted, so as the teacher, you will be able to look back at the first completion of the assignment and see how students improved with the reassignment. 

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