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Thanks for all the great information! A good source for scientific articles is Newsela.com. Teachers can find an article and modify the lexile ranges without having to rewrite the whole article. The struggling readers will read the article at their own level. The pictures are the same so it looks like all the students are reading the same article. I like the idea of adding annotations. Our ELA teachers ask Science teachers to help teach annotations. The use of annotations has really helped students understand technical science reading when the students make the annotations. When students are reading to form an argument, we'll ask them to use emojis to annotate. A smiley means the sentence can be used to support an argument and a frown means the opposite. Students use hashtags to annotate information they think is important and exclamation points if they feel the information is interesting. By adding a personal connection to the reading, students can organize the new information in a useful way to promote understandings. I've attached a power point with examples of student annotations from an article about Fracking. The whole lesson is on Betterlesson.com.

Sydney Schuler
STEM Teacher, Consultant, Advisor
Chicago

Thank you! I started doing more close reading with students last year using DocentEDU. Your suggestions for annotating and adding to scientific texts will work great with it. DocentEDU lets you add information (along with questions and discussions) into any website.