Sometimes it can feel challenging to get your teen to read anything other than texts or social media posts. Teens can grow tired of being told what to read and for how many pages and try to avoid reading or just get it over with instead of developing their own reading interests and habits. Technology doesn’t have to be a distraction from reading; there’s some great resources out there to help your teen choose a topic of interest and get some reading in, whether your teen likes sports, technology, fashion, justice, mental health issues, etc. Here’s two key resources to get your teen reading more:

Newsla

This site gives you and your teen (or child of any age) access to thousands of articles on every topic imaginable. There’s current events of major news and local and other news that might go unnoticed in typical news sources. Newsela draws a lot of their material from newspapers and sites and adapts and formats them for teen interest. A cool feature of Newsela is that you can select the lexile level of the article, so you can select the grade level that most closely aligns with your child or you can push their reading with high interest articles above their reading level. Newsela also has text sets where they group articles by similar topics, so if your teen has a clear interest they can also easily find several articles that connect.

Commonlit

While Newsela’s focus is on adapting the news, (although there’s other texts and resources, too!) Commonlit has texts and excerpts of all genres. The site allows search by topic, theme, grade level, and even by literary devices most prevalent in the text. Every text also has a tab called “Paired texts” that includes several texts of all different genres (including videos) that connect well to each other. A great way to build reading interest is by pairing it with other texts on the same topic, especially videos or interviews, that will make your teen want to read and discover more. Commonlit is also great for readers who prefer audiobooks because you can opt to have texts read to you. While it’s totally okay to let your teen just read and enjoy, there’s also annotation tools, multiple choice questions, and discussion questions available.