Since the wide-spread adoption of Common Core Standards across the U.S., abcteach has been creating materials, and tagging existing ones, to help educators and students meet the required guidelines. On abcteach, you can find these activities by navigating our directory system or by using our search tool. So how do you get started? Read on to find out.
Finding the Standard
First, you’ll need to find the standard that you’d like to address. If you don’t already have this information, you can visit the Common Core website. Click on Mathematics Standards or English Language Arts Standards.
Using the left sidebar (pictured left), navigate to the subject and grade level of your choice. Once you’ve made your selection, you’ll see a list of standards in that category on the right side of the page. Peculiarly, the Language Standards are listed by subject first and grade level second, while Mathematics Standards are listed by grade level first and subject second. On abcteach, by contrast, you’ll notice that grade level always comes first, followed by subject.
Navigating on abcteach
On abcteach, navigating to the right section is easy. Click on the “Common Core Standards” category on the homepage (Under “Categories” on the member site or under “Explore Our Free Materials” for non-members), or follow these links: Members | Non-members. Once there, navigate using the subcategory list to either English Language Arts (ELA) or Mathematics, then to the grade level and subject of your choice. Find these subcategories links directly below the blue “Subcategories” bar. Below the subcategories, find the list of related downloadable materials, and click on the thumbnail or title to download the document. If you’re comfortable navigating the abcteach directory to find standards materials, you can stop reading now and start exploring! If you’d like some advanced tips about how to conduct searches for materials that meet specific standards, keep reading.
Searching by Code
Returning to the Common Core website, you’ll see that each standard has an associated code like this:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.1
You can use this code to search for a particular standard on abcteach, with the caveat that you’ll want to only use part of the code. On abcteach, you should search using the last bit of this code, namely everything after “CCSS.ELA-Literacy.“ This leaves simply:
RL.3.1
When you search using this code on abcteach, you’ll find every document matching RL.3.1 (Reading And Literature, Grade 3, Standard 1). Go ahead and try this yourself. Head to www.abcteach.com (if you’re a member, use members.abcteach.com) and type “RL.3.1” into the search bar. You’ll see 7 results matching this particular standard.
Broadening Your Search
Referring again to our example, you’ll see that there are actually 10 standards that make up the Reading: Literature section for Grade 3. In our search above, we limited ourselves to only the first standard (represented by the “1” at the end of the code “RL.3.1”). To view all matches on abcteach for this level (not just those for the 1st out of 10 standards), remove the last decimal point and number. Try searching for: RL.3
You’ll see that making your search more general has increased the number of search results to 27 documents. If you’re not getting the quantity of results you’re hoping for, just remember to make your search less specific. Let’s look at another standard code. This one is for Grade 4 > Operations and Algebraic Thinking.
CCSS.Math.Content.4.OA.A.1
Yikes. This seems kind of complicated. But let’s try to focus on the most relevant parts of the code. Cut out the standard prefix “CCSS.Math.Content.” and the suffix “.A.1” (which refers to subsections A, B, and C of this standard), and search using:
4.OA
This will include all abcteach materials that match subject 4.OA (4th grade, Operations and Algebraic Thinking). To drive the point home, here are more standards and the keywords you should use to search. Hopefully, you’ll see the pattern emerge in the list below if it isn’t clear already.
CCSS.Math.Content.3.MD.A.1 —> 3.MD
CCSS.Math.Content.1.G.A.1 —> 1.G
CCSS.Math.Content.2.NBT.B.8 —> 2.NBT
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.4.8 —> W.4
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.1 —> RL.K
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.2.1 —> SL.2
By now, you should have a good idea of how to find or search for activities matching specific Common Core standards on abcteach. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below and we’ll be happy to help.