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June, 2013

Announcing New Premium Worksheets

The Common Core State Standards are one of the current hot topics in education. As schools across the country have begun to adopt the standards, teachers must find new ways to assess the critical and higher order thinking skills they measure. Test Designer’s members can now find ways to assess the Common Core State Standards directly through standards-aligned worksheets on HelpTeaching.com.

Worksheets aligned to the Common Core English standards can already be found on Test Designer. As soon as you open a Common Core aligned worksheet, a new module on the print preview page allows you to instantly see the standards the worksheet is aligned with.

One of the first subject areas of Test Designer to be aligned to the standards is language arts. Many of the worksheets you will find in the reading strategies category have been designed to include the in-depth analysis, reasoning and comparison and contrast skills that the standards promote. Students will also be introduced to longer reading passages and associated questions, similar to what they will find on many standardized exams. For example, eighth grade students can analyze President Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation in the Analyzing a Speech worksheet and fifth grade students can analyze characters in popular short stories. Common Core aligned worksheets are also available for grammar instruction. Instead of simply identifying the parts of speech, students can put them to use combining sentences and correcting punctuation. Many of the Common Core Standards for language are already represented through worksheets available on the Test Designer site.

English teachers are not the only ones who can access standards-aligned worksheets. Worksheets are also available for math for grades two through five on topics such as money word problems and for grades six to eight on topics such as the Pythagorean Theorem and Geometric Solids. While the Common Core Standards do not cover general science and social studies skills, teachers can also access premium worksheets in these areas. These premium worksheets, such as one Muscular System Anatomy, feature high-quality images and content.

Throughout the summer, Help Teaching team plans to add worksheets covering nearly all Common Core standards and content areas. However, access to these Common Core aligned worksheets and future worksheets is only available by subscribing to Help Teaching Pro.