Engaging Students in Reading and Literacy with Newsela

When it comes to literacy skills, students these days have a lot of potential for learning and growth. With the advent of technology, our students are more engaged than ever before in reading and writing activities that can help them improve their literacy levels. Whether they’re using text on the table, online sources, or interactive reading programs within the classroom, there’s plenty of opportunity to practice and hone their skills with guidance from teachers and peers. With a combination of quality instruction, stimulating lessons, and ample practice opportunities, students now have more tools then ever to become confident readers and writers.

Today I wanted to share Newsela. Newsela is an online news and literacy platform that features articles for a range of topics and subject areas.

Newsela is a free database of curated nonfiction articles for students from a wide array of sources. Newsela collects news articles and stories from more than 100 partners, including The New York Times, Highlights, The Washington Post, Science Friday, Scientific American, and more. 

Newsela articles are always free but some Newsela features are only accesible in the paid version. 

  • Content includes articles, worksheets, and videos. 
  • Teachers can create classes and enroll students. Newsela also syncs with Google Classroom. 
  • Teachers can create and save "Text Sets". These sets can be shared with students or used to assign individual articles.
  • Most articles are available in both Spanish and English.
  • Students can highlight and anotate articles.
  • Most articles have reading comprension "Write" and "Quiz".
  • Teachers can also customize the instruciton to add tasks or prompts when they create an assignment. 

When students go to an assigned article at newsela.com or on the Newsela mobile app they can complete the following actions:
  • Read the article at all reading levels
  • Take the quiz at all reading levels
  • Highlight and annotate at all reading levels
  • Submit a writing response to the Newsela writing prompt
  • Complete Power Words activities (when the school has Newsela ELA and the article has Power Words)

If you are interested in seeing Newsela as a student, please join our Newsela PD Class and start exploring.

Learn more
What are you waiting for, let's get students using text as part of our learning experiences!

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