Library Guides: Education Resources for K-12 : K-12 Databases

K-12 Reading Resources Outside UM Libraries

Free Reading and Literacy Resources Available to the Public
This article provides a comprehensive list of General Reading Websites, Read-Alongs and Virtual Storytimes, and Fun Reading Games. It also touches on reading and writing resources for teens and tweens.

*Note: These links are designed to be publicly accessible, and are neither managed nor maintained by the university. As a result, some may change or break over time.

Databases Designed for K-12 Students

Literary Reference Source This link opens in a new window
Author biographies and literary criticism appropriate for secondary students
Primary Search This link opens in a new window
Appropriate for elementary school students. All full text articles are assigned a reading level indicator (Lexiles).
Middle Search Plus This link opens in a new window
Appropriate for middle school students. All full text articles are assigned a reading level indicator (Lexiles).
CQ Researcher This link opens in a new window
Database appropriate for high school students. Provides reports on current, controversial issues in America.
MAS Ultra This link opens in a new window
Full text for hundreds of popular high school magazines, biographies, primary source documents, and reference books, along with a large collection of images, maps and flags.
TOPICsearch This link opens in a new window
Full text for over 102,000 articles on social, political and economic issues, scientific discoveries, and other popular topics discussed in today's classrooms, including controversial opinions and viewpoints.
NoveList This link opens in a new window
This engaging, user-friendly database is an excellent resource to get your students reading fiction. Search titles by topic, genre, and intended age group.

Lexile Reading Levels
This resource, which is freely available online, identifies books based on lexile ranges. You can search by specific titles, lexile level, or school grade.

Book Collection: Nonfiction This link opens in a new window
Full text and abstracts of 4000 nonfiction books. Topics include, but are not limited to, careers, disabilities, technology, history, and civics.

Mississippi Digital Library
Search the history of Mississippi through this freely available database of digitized materials from Mississippi colleges and universities.

Improve your Keyword Searching

Specificity: Instead of bugs, use mosquitoes or beetles.

Use Boolean Operators:

AND (critical thinking AND children: only articles with both words)
OR (critical thinking OR children: all articles with either word)
NOT (critical thinking NOT children: a subset of articles on memory)

Descriptors: Find alternate keywords in the list of tags/subjects under Quick Look for articles that meet your needs.

Phrases: Use quotation marks around phrases (“body image”).

Truncation: Use an asterisk (*) to find all forms of a word. For example, type parent* to search parent, parental, parenting, etc.

Wild Cards: Use a question mark (?) in the middle of a word to search for all possible replacement letters. For example, wom?n will search woman and women.

Search Guides

Education Resources for K-12

K-12 Reading Resources Outside UM Libraries

Databases Designed for K-12 Students

Improve your Keyword Searching