College and Career Readiness--Ensuring Students' Success in the Future!

College and Career Readiness (CCR) is an enormously important part of the Common Core State Standards. As an educator, it can be difficult at times to find creative, effective ways to bridge the gap between the K-12 classroom and the world of post-secondary education and career training. One helpful strategy is to understand what it is that businesses and growth-oriented careers actually look for and need when they're hiring.

To get a better idea of what awaits your students when they leave the classroom, CHECK OUT BUSINESSANDEDUCATION.ORG, a fantastic collection of resources and information supported by achieve.org, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization focused on making CCR an education priority.

On the website you will find extensive, well-supported information about CCR, along with an overview of CCR standards and links to business and career-related resources. You can even look at what's happening with the CCR initiatives in your state and see how you can integrate your classroom practices with these initiatives!

Who Knew Science Could be Tasty?! Food Chemistry and Cooking!

Whether you're looking for fun educational activities for your own kids as the summer winds down, or whether you're interested in finding ways to integrate exciting, hands-on learning into your science lessons in the coming school year, CHECK OUT THESE ACTIVITIES from PBS Learning Media, collected here on the KQED Website.

Building and using solar cookers to cook s'mores and explore sustainable energy... Learning to read labels and understand how to make healthy choices... Exploring cheesemaking to get a better grasp of biological processes... Digging into the anthropology of food practices and holiday food rituals... Even learning about the chemical compounds in onions that make us cry!

There's plenty of fun--and learning--to be found here, so take a look and get excited about the science of food!

Choosing Texts for ELA CCSS

The Common Core State Standards for ELA are in part designed to help students become engaged, critical, interactive readers and interpreters of texts and information. As students grow into more capable readers and learn new strategies for engaging with texts and resource materials, educators can select texts with increasing levels of complexity to challenge their students and motivate them to move forward. Many teachers have questions about how to make these text selections, and how to find texts that are aligned
with the CCSS.

Achievethecore.org has a toolbox of resources for teachers to help them better understand what goes into text selection, and how to choose texts and reading materials that align with the expectations for text complexity set by the CCSS for each grade level.

CHECK OUT THEIR TEXT COMPLEXITY PAGE to find resources for measuring text complexity, finding texts, lesson planning from text complexity, and more.