What are the Common Core State Standards?

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are a set of content-based academic standards that are scheduled to be in use by 45 of 50 states by 2014. Where not "officially" in use, these standards will still have an enormous impact on what is taught in the classroom.

Essentially, the common core is a new set of standards that seeks to improve reading comprehension across the curriculum. Backed up by extensive unbiased scientific research, input from experts at all levels of education, and the work of E.D. Hirsch and others at the Core Knowledge Foundation, the pivotal idea behind the common core is that students must have extensive background knowledge in order to truly comprehend the texts they encounter in both academic and real-world settings, the acquisition of which has not been part of most K-8 learning in about forty years.

Can you please repeat that in plain English?

The common core mandates that teachers of all subjects, at all K-12 levels, must make certain that their students are becoming better, more fluent readers alongside learning course content. The key to this fluency is background knowledge to understand the content of a piece of text. Acquiring this background knowledge must begin as early as possible.

For example, pre-CCSS, high school students learned about the American Revolution, often encountering names like Marquis de Lafayette, John Paul Jones, Ethan Allen, and Benedict Arnold for the first time. Because students are overwhelmed with the names and terms, which students have often never before encountered, understanding texts related to them is difficult. The CCSS aims to correct this by introducing names, dates, and facts in elementary school, thus giving students background knowledge they can build upon, through extensive use of fact-based worksheets, nonfictional texts, etc.

How do the materials at Student Handouts meet the Common Core State Standards?

Student Handouts offers thousands of worksheets, workbooks, eBooks, primary source documents, and more that address the content standards of the common core at all grade levels.

For example, beginning at the earliest grades, children must build a knowledge base that includes the important people and places of history. We have vast numbers of worksheets and activities that can be used to help build this base. If you look under Holidays for Presidents Day, you will find coloring pages with handwriting practice than be used to introduce kids to men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Likewise, there is a poetry unscramble worksheet on George Washington for kids a little older. Browse the page, and you'll find many more worksheets, lesson plans, activities, and teaching ideas for all grade levels. And that's just a page for celebrating the holiday!

We are in the unique position of offering materials that simultaneously cater to struggling readers and advanced readers who are looking to increase their vocabulary in order to prepare for college admissions tests such as the ACT and SAT.

We are completely confident that educators who use our materials with their students will improve their kids' content knowledge, reading skills, and test scores.

Sample Reviews:

I work in an Alternative Education Setting. Down time is never a good thing. This booklet fits our needs, because it is geared towards a wide range of students. I really like how questions are asked throughout the passage after short segments of reading. Many of our students have difficulties with reading comprehension. Asking questions along the way, helps students stay focused and not get lost in the passage. It also improves comprehension.

This 18-page download is terrific if you are looking for a quick unit study on Abraham Lincoln or need to supplement your American History curriculum. This download contains several pages of information about Abraham Lincoln with corresponding reading comprehension questions. The end of this download contains additional study sheets such as an impressive vocabulary page using words like vicissitude, enfranchisement and bulwarks.

This was great. Just what I was looking for! Well written, laid out and easy to understand. Best of all, My kids get it!

I really like the way these workbooks are set up. The reading sections are short enough to keep the student's interest with good information that can be used to supplement another curriculum. I'm using this workbook as a supplement to the curriculum I already have.

Our materials are used by everyone from regular classroom teachers, to special education reading room facilitators, to homeschooling parents.