The High Progress Literacy TextDepot

Educators Sharing Text Sets with Educators

Welcome to TextDepot, a place to build, store, share, and get text sets selected by educators for educators. TextDepot is free for HPL members, and HPL membership is free. So login and start browsing!

What would you like to do?

Learn about TextDepot and how it works

Explore the texts in TextDepot

Learn about TextDepot’s Early Childhood Big Books Project

See examples of text sets

Get help with to build a text set or find texts to add to a text set

Browse Text Sets for Science and Social Studies

How does TextDepot work?
TextDepot contains two types of materials: Works that are publicly available on the Internet and works that have been created by educators like you for inclusion in TextDepot. Text sets are organized by content area and topic. Topics are chosen to correspond to most state content standards as well as Common Core State Standards, the C-3 Social Studies Framework, and the Next Generation Science Standards. Members access and use existing materials and then share back the materials they discover on the web or author themselves. TextDepot is a work in progress! Collaboration among its members allows us to continue to build new text sets and expand existing text sets.
How to use TextDepot
Easy. If you don’t already have an account with HPL, simply go to Sign Up in the menu bar at the top and sign up. (Be sure to make note about your username and password so you can come back often!) Then come back to this page and browse by category for text sets that other educators have created. Download what you like.
How to Add to a Text Set
When you find something out there on the interwebs that you think would be useful for a particular text set, use the BE AWESOME button  that you’ll find on every text set page, to share it with us for inclusion in a that text set. The texts you find are sent to our curator who will read it and format it for printing and upload it to TextDepot. Note that you will find empty text sets…waiting for you to help to fill!
TextDepot and High Progress Literacy
High progress literacy practices revolve around engaging students with text. Teachers in high progress classrooms focus on increasing student’s use of literary practices so that they can independently learn content. For this to be feasible, teachers and students must be able to access high-quality informational texts that go beyond textbooks. TextDepot addresses that need.
Learn more about teaching with text sets
Visit The New Norms for Learning in HPL pages to learn more about teaching students how to use informational texts to learn content–the same ways that historians, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers do. When kids learn the norms for learning content from texts–how to preview, read closely, take notes, talk to monitor and deepen comprehension, and talk and write from notes–they can learn just about anything! Watch the video at the right to learn more about what text sets are and how we build them in TextDepot.

This video provides an overview of text sets and how we build them in TextDepot. Use the fullscreen button at the bottom of the video to watch in fullscreen. Press escape when you’re finished.

TextDepot's Big Books Project

Teachers in grades Pre-K through 3rd grade often have a hard time finding texts that teach our science and social studies standards…so we are helping teachers like you to start write and publsih your own electronic big books for Shared Reading in science and social studies!

The TextDepot Big Books Project is a work in progress–driven by teachers for students.

Check out what we have so far, and check back often. We are publishing new books every week!

Get Help with Text Sets & Help to Build Them!

HPLA’s TextDepot exists to make it easier for teachers to provide text-based instruction across every content area, including articles, maps, photos, political cartoons… Log in and check out what we have already archived by clicking on any of the portal buttons above. (You must be logged in to move beyond this page, so if you don’t already have an account, sign up for one now. IT’S FREE!)

Browse texts by topic. Click on individual items to preview them. Download anything you want to use. 

Share what you have that we don’t. Please share back with us what you have that we don’t have! You’ll find a BE AWESOME button on each text set page. Be Awesome buttons open up a customized form that you can use to send us web links or documents for our curators to consider adding to our text sets. When you send a document or website, it does not automatically upload. It goes through a review process, and then we will format it as a PDF and upload it to the appropriate text set. 

Contact us for help. Once inside TextDepot, if you don’t find what you are looking for and want our help to build or find additional materials to add to a text set, simply click on the Contact Us button that you will find on each categories page and let us know how we can help. Be specific about your needs. One of our curators will contact you. 

The Dust Bowl

Using a Text Set

Properties of Light

Solar System

Learning Content from Informational Text

Three Branches of Government

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The No Nonsense Fine Print

The materials in TextDepot are intended exclusively for educational purposes. We have done our best to include only materials that are publicly available and that do not appear to infringe on anyone’s profiting from creative works. This is the intent of fair use laws, though we are not attorneys. We leave it to teachers, schools, and school districts to adhere to all copyright laws. 

We act as a repository of text sets. Before adding items to TextDepot, we review materials to ascertain that a work will represent a reasonable addition to a collection of educational text sets. We check texts for accuracy; we do not exclude works that include opinions. We believe that good instruction includes teaching students how to sort out and evaluate sources of information and to identify primary sources.

The works in the TextDepot are in PDF files. This is to make their use as practical as possible in classrooms. It is not intended to make the work look original or to detract from the author’s original format. For texts that have been found on the Internet, we provide the web address and encourage TextDepot users to visit the address for more information. The PDF format is for two reasons: 1) when students are learning how to preview, read closely and take notes, the research shows that students benefit from having paper copies that they can mark up during reading; and 2) due to our awareness that many schools still do not have good Internet access or access for each individual student. We believe in universal access and look forward to the day when TextDepot can simply reference information on the web without altering the original format.