It’s summertime, and time to find great informational texts!

Like many English teachers, one of the top reasons I look forward to summer is having TIME TO READ! But while I’ve been blazing through my pile of summer fiction, I’m also basking in the joy of having enough free time to catch up with The Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, Wired, The Week, and other great sources of informational texts. Yes! Summer reading is a perfect opportunity to start looking for those high-interest articles that will hook your students into the longer works (both fiction and nonfiction) that you’ll be reading next year.

In addition to catching up with all of my favorite periodicals, I’m scanning my list of tried-and-true informational text sources for anything recent and relevant to the works I’ll be teaching next year and bookmarking anything that looks promising in Evernote (thanks to Sarah Mulhern Gross’s Twitter tip, LeBron James’ Sports Illustrated essay is already tagged for follow-up, though I haven’t figured out how I might use it yet). For Gatsby, I’m looking for new articles on the American Dream (lots has been written about that in recent months). For Othello, I’m looking for new pieces on jealousy and insecurity in relationships.

But, since I do not plan to miss out on summer by spending it all in front of my laptop, I’m letting Google do some of the work for me. After thinking through my curriculum and coming up with a list of topics related to each unit, I created Google alerts for each of them, which is super easy. Right now I have them set to email me the results of Google’s search once a week; as it gets closer to September, I might set some of them to send results daily if I haven’t found what I’m looking for yet. After spending the day in the sun (or lost in the pages of a new YA novel), I look through what Google has found and tag what looks interesting in Evernote. I might read it right then, or wait till I find a few pieces to choose from. I like using Evernote for this purpose because it’s easy to tag things with multiple tags that you can then easily search by later. But you can also use the bookmarking tool in your browser, pin them to a board on Pinterest so others can see them, or just download them to a folder on your desktop. Once I’ve chosen the pieces I want to add to my curriculum, I’ll start writing vocabulary, discussion, and writing questions for them (click here for models) at my leisure, which inevitably gets me excited about the new school year.

So, by all means seize and savor the well-earned relaxation summer affords you, but spending a little of it doing some of the things we often don’t have time for during the school year can set you up for a spectacular start come September.