The Middle and Upper Grades Reading Roundup

Keeping middle and high school students engaged in reading

Teachers already know that engagement is one of the biggest challenges in keeping middle and high school students reading. Screens, packed schedules, and reluctant readers can make it difficult to keep students interested and confident. ReadWorks helps educators meet that challenge with research-backed resources proven to build reading confidence and engagement—giving students meaningful, high-interest material that keeps them reading.

→ Explore what ReadWorks has built for upper-grade readers, all for free. 

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New content built for middle and high school readers 

ReadWorks offers high-interest articles and short stories chosen to extend what your students are already reading in their chapter books and novels to respect their growing maturity, accessible enough for every student in the room.

Check out these new upper grade texts that can be used on their own, with your curriculum unit, or as a Book Study. All added to ReadWorks this summer!

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Amelia Earhart

The Beaver Natures Ecosystem Engineer

Frederick Douglass

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→ Browse all new secondary content

The cliffhanger fiction series students ask to finish

Each installment ends mid-tension — the “wait, what happens next?” moment that gets students opening the next piece without being asked twice. Teachers tell us it's some of the strongest independent-reading buy-in they've seen all year.

There are more than six series for middle and high school students! Easily a good 2-3 weeks of engaging reading depending on the pace of your class. Some series have supporting StepReads articles, vocabulary activities, and question sets. 


→ Explore all the series

By far one of our most popular series!
The Run (Series 1-7) 
We even include alternate endings written by students! 

​Go deeper on what you're already teaching

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​Pair your class novels and units with topical reading passages built for comprehension and discussion to dive deeper into background knowledge and comprehension practice. The newest high school Book Study is for Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

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Get hundreds of articles that build background knowledge around topics based on the novels that you are reading in class. Books such as The Giver, The Outsiders, Persopolis, Animal Farm, and many more. 

→ View all Book Studies

FREE WEBINAR • OCT 6

What adolescents actually gain from complex texts

Susanne Nobles (ReadWorks)  ×  Debbie Reck (Riveting Results)

A closer look at how adolescents engage with content-rich, complex texts and how to get them to experience reading that is satisfying and empowering. Come away with evidence-based moves that can be used in the classroom right away.

RESERVE YOUR SPOT

Provide materials that your students actually want to read!

You can even find out exactly what they are interested in when you use our Reading Mindset Snapshot, a quick three-minute survey tool for your students to complete and for you to gain a year’s worth of insight.

→ Assign the Reading Mindset Snapshot