Contact:
Alex Wladich
Scholastic Inc.
212-965-7353
awladich@scholastic.com

NEW YORK, NY — (June 20, 2013) — Scholastic (NASDAQ: SCHL), the global children’s publishing, education and media company, today announced Scholastic Text Sets, collections of nonfiction books for grades K-6 built around science- and social studies-based themes. The supplemental reading collections contain books for whole-class read-alouds, small group work, and independent reading, helping students build crucial background knowledge as they tackle rigorous text.

"With the Common Core placing special emphasis on the importance of teaching with nonfiction informational texts, and incorporating more reading into content area instruction, educators are telling us they need themed collections of books built around the topics they most commonly teach," said Greg Worrell, President of Scholastic Classroom and Community Group. "Text Sets offer teachers exciting complex texts that meet the Common Core, and resources and supports to flexibly incorporate them into their ELA instruction block."

Each Text Sets collection exposes students to six different nonfiction titles built around the same theme – from plants to geography to ancient civilization and more. The collections contain 55 books in total: 30 copies of an anchor text for whole group instruction; six copies of four different supporting texts for small group work or independent reading; and one copy of a title for reading aloud. Each set comes with student response sheets and resources to help teachers incorporate the books into Common Core-ready instruction – requiring students to answer text-based questions, practice evidence-based writing, build academic and domain-specific vocabulary, and develop strategies for tackling increasingly complex texts.

Already being used in classrooms across the country, from New York to Hawaii, Text Sets help teachers meet Common Core expectations by:

• Engaging the whole class on a single topic.
• Modeling a close reading of a text.
• Deepening subject knowledge by reading across multiple texts.
• Providing opportunities for text dependent responses from students.

For more information about Scholastic’s offerings for the Common Core, visit www.scholastic.com/commoncore.