Free Texts

This site has an extensive collection of over 5,000 poems by occasion, theme, and form. Users can search by title or first line of the poem.

Teaching a famous speech? American Rhetoric houses 100 famous speeches complete with transcripts and audio.

Awesome Stories is a free website with compelling stories including related primary-source evidence in the form of videos, audio clips, documents, and images.

Access thousands of free e-books, poems, articles, short stories, and plays. The site includes a large reference and nonfiction section as well as several detailed study guides for texts of classic literature, drama, and poetry.

CommonLit is an online library collection of fiction and nonfiction texts. Teachers can search by Lexile range, text, genre, and literary devices.

This website is a source for current events, news and non-fictional content for ELA, Science and Social Studies.

This online collection houses historic photos, advertisements, texts, and more.

Epic! provides an unlimited selection of eBooks that can be instantly discovered, read and shared with friends.

Making connections to American History? Use the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History’s site to view their collection of primary sources and their museum exhibitions.

Want to teach with the news, but not sure if you have enough time? Inshorts condenses the latest news stories into 60-word blurbs, so users can stay informed.

International Children's Digital Library offers students access to free high-quality digital books from around the world. Browse by age, genre, book length, character types, language, geographic regions and much more.

A “one-stop shop” website where users can find several versions of Shakespeare’s works. The works on this site include scholarly annotations and supplemental materials including introductions, contexts, performances, and much more.

This site is an alternative to traditional printed textbooks and provides context for weekly reading and writing instruction with images, websites, infographics, mixed media texts, and more!

Visit this site to access weekly informational articles to read aloud to your students to build content knowledge.

Letters of Note gathers letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos from both famous and unknown people from various time periods.

Choose the grade level you are looking for and browse through their collection of texts.

A free online collection of stories and poems. Each piece of literature is in PDF and audio format. A short summary, citation, word count, and time length are provided for each text.

This public radio podcast tells non-fiction narratives from history. It received a Peabody Award in 2016.

Find age-appropriate books, articles, encyclopedic entries, and interviews that meet the text complexity demands by grade level.

This website contains primary and secondary sources as well as lessons and webinars.

NCWiseOwl provides schools across North Carolina with access to articles from thousands of magazines, encyclopedias, and reference sources. Please contact your library administrator or media coordinator to obtain the Library Password.

Access hundreds of news articles, quizzes, and text sets by Lexile. New articles are added daily.

Washington, D.C.’s Newseum created a teacher resource for activities, artifacts, and classroom ideas.

This website offers daily news, current events and videos for kids.

Former Poet Laureate of the United States selected 180 poems, one for each school day, with high school students in mind.

The website of children’s author, Kenn Nesbitt, where you will find lots of funny poems and poetry books for children, classic children’s poetry, games, contests, poetry lessons and activities, journals, plus rhyming dictionary, funny poetry podcasts, videos, and lots more.

This site allows you to browse poems, poets and seasonal poems. It features articles, audio & podcasts, and many other resources for teachers. You can browse poetry in all issues of Poetry Magazine all the way back to 1912!

Project Gutenberg is a free digital library offering over 53,000 ebooks, newsletters, and articles.

ReadWorks is a site that contains high-quality curated nonfiction and literary articles.

Storyline Online is an online resource containing books that include supplemental curriculum developed by a credentialed elementary educator, aiming to strengthen comprehension and verbal and written skills for English-language learners.

This site offers free audio stories for kids.

Story Shares exists to bring more age-appropriate, accessible stories to reluctant readers.

Tween Tribune provides daily news articles. This website is filled with great resources, such as lesson plans filtered by topic, grade level and standards; Smithsonian resources; and news stories about issues that impact educators. Articles are available in both English and Spanish.

This site poses an interesting question each day and explores it in a variety of ways. The “Wonder Ground” is a section created specifically for educators and includes lesson plans, and classroom resources that correlate to education standards.