CCSS Texts: Literary and Informational
Texts that support CCSS must contain the specific characteristics necessary to measure different standards.
According to the standards, the two kinds of texts that should be used in CCSS aligned instruction and assessments
are literary and informational texts.
Literary Texts:
Stories
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For K-5: includes children’s adventure stories, folktales, legends, fables, fantasy, realistic fiction, and myth
For 6-12: includes subgenres of adventure stories, historical fiction, mysteries, myths, science fiction,
realistic fiction, allegories, parodies, satire, and graphic novels)
Dramas
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For K-5: includes staged dialogue and brief familiar scenes
For 6-12: includes one-act and multi-act plays, both in written form and on film
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For K-5: includes nursery rhymes and the subgenres of the narrative poem, limerick, and free verse poem
For 6-12: the subgenres of narrative poems, lyrical poems, free verse poems, sonnets, odes, ballads, and
epics
Poetry
Informational Texts:
Literary Nonfiction
• For K-5: includes biographies and autobiographies
• For 6-12: includes the subgenres of exposition, argument, and functional text in the form of personal essays,
speeches, opinion pieces, essays about art or literature, biographies, memoirs, journalism, and historical,
scientific, technical, or economic accounts (including digital sources) written for a broad audience
Historical, Scientific, and Technical Texts
• For K-5: texts about history, social studies, science, and the arts; technical texts, including directions, forms,
and information displayed in graphs, charts, or maps, and digital sources on a range of topics.
• For 6-12: includes historical, scientific, technical, or economic accounts (including digital sources) written for
a broad audience.
All texts should display:
• Craft: at a level that is noteworthy and or widely recognized
• Significance: the text is seminal or influential in its respective genre
• Content: the text contains ideas or themes that are interesting, engaging, provocative, and significant
Selected texts need not have all three of these criteria, but the standards demand that some of them are present in
selected texts.
Informational texts should display:
• Relevant and accurate content
• A clear point of view and/or purpose
• A discernible main idea and a developed and clear organizational structure
• Any argumentation in the text should contain claims supported by evidence in the text
Literary texts should display:
• Significant themes that can support analysis
• A developed and clear narrative structure
• A clearly discernible point of view
Again, selected informational and literary texts need not have all of these criteria, but the standards demand that
some of them are present in selected texts.
Resources for locating potential texts:
IConn, Connecticut’s free online database
John Winthrop’s online databases
The Library of Congress has a database where you can search for classroom materials by CCSS and grade level.
In addition, your school librarian can link you to many primary source archives which are available such as the NYS
Archives.
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/
http://www.archives.nysed.gov/aindex.shtml
From EngageNY.org of the New York State Education Department.
[Guidance for selection: Quality and Opportunity for CCSS aligned instruction and assessment]
Internet. Available from [Selection of Authentic Texts for Common Core Instruction: Guidance and a List of
Resources for Text Selection]; accessed [Tuesday, 18th, June, 2013].
Informational Text Sources
Blogs (www.blogger.com-good resource): a really easy-to-use site that allows you to start a blog in just three basic steps using a
range of templates. Now it is a part of google. Blogs are also located through our JW webserver program.
Videos: Discovery Ed videos: http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/
Youtube-keeping organized files of various subject matter, so you could then access them easily).
Radio: National Public Radio (http://www.npr.org/)
How to listen: http://www.real.com/resources/npr
Poetry: “Poems for Middle Schoolers”: http://somepeomsforkids.wordpress.com/found-poems-2/
Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/86 (categorizes poems into concepts for
teaching, ie. imagery, etc.)
Middle School Poetry 180: http://middleschoolpoetry180.wordpress.com/ (a poem for every day of the
school year)
Speeches:
http://www.famous-speeches-and-speech-topics.info/famous-speeches/index.htm (audio)
(including: Adolf Hitler declaring war on U.S., Dwight Eisenhower, Chance for Peace,
Winston Churchill, many speeches)
http://www.history.com/speeches (audio and visual)