Screenshot from www.newsela.com
At every grade level, especially high school, teachers struggle to find high interest current events that students will enjoy reading, regardless of their reading level. The Newsela website (www.newsela.com) is a gold mine! Articles are correlated to the Common Core Literacy Standards and include topics ranging from Science to War. The teachers that I work with have been very excited about using it because it allows the instructor to adjust the Lexile score of an article to fit an individual student’s ability. In practical terms, it means a high school student on a 5th grade reading level can be sitting beside a student on a 12th grade reading level essentially reading the same article. For a struggling high school reader, this is phenomenal! No more embarrassment for a student because his reading material doesn’t look as “hard” as the other students. What a great tool for differentiating instruction in the classroom! An added bonus is an online quiz that accompanies the article. Articles can also be printed if a hard copy is better-suited for your classroom.