Would you like to enliven your 20th century American history or science lesson with a fun, challenging writing project? The Apollo 11 Moon Landing RAFT Writing Project contains a RAFT writing project for the social studies or science classroom. This project may be used as a creative research project or as a summarizing assignment to end a unit of study on Apollo 11. What is a RAFT, you might ask? RAFT is an acronym for a powerful writing strategy that provides rigor, flexibility, and variety. RAFT stands for Role, Audience, Format, and Topic. A RAFT can be implemented in all content areas, thus making it an excellent Writing Across the Curriculum resource. Young writers might pursue one of several genres of writing (expository, narrative, descriptive, argumentative or persuasive) to create one of several products (letter, television commercial, diary entry, etc.).

As you may know, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) place significant emphasis on the incorporation of informational texts into the curriculum. These texts might include freshly published articles and essays, foundational U.S. documents, and historic speeches. I hope the following resources will help take the guesswork out of finding these resources and save you some time along the way. This list is far from comprehensive, but I tried to ensure that each publication listed below has at least some free long-form content available. Remember that some publications will eventually restrict access to their articles and essays behind a paywall, but to avoid possible loss of access, please consider "clipping" the article with a tool like Evernote, Instapaper, or Pocket. Last, I have linked the Text Complexity Grade Bands and Lexile Bands to help you get started using appropriate CCSS-related Lexile levels.