Rewordify

Common Core dictates that a portion of your students' comprehension lessons should be gleaned from texts that would be considered difficult for them due to content, structure, and/or vocabulary.  It also calls for lessons to be integrated across content areas for deeper student thinking and connections.  Primary source historical documents are fantastic for these lessons and the content is well worthy of plunking your students in the middle of, but their vocabulary can be challenging to our modern vernacular.  The key is in providing just enough scaffolding to allow the students to tackle the meaning without pre-digesting the text for them.  You might find help in this endeavor from Rewordify.com.  At Rewordify, you can enter a text passage that contains  tier 2 words or , and it will highlight the difficult words within the text and replace them or provide sidenote synonym or definition - your choice.   Pretty fantastic for vocabulary building and accessibility to higher level texts.  Check out this example of the first sentence of this post rewordified.

Neat-o huh! Check it out !