Tag Archives: lesson plan

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“Level Up” Your Teaching with Newsela Pro

This is the second post in a series of three, and it focuses on ideas for Newsela Pro users. For ideas for the free version of Newsela, check out my last post.

So you have access to Newsela Pro, but you only use the quizzes. Here are two easy ways you can “level up” how you use Newsela Pro in your classroom.

  1. Supporting Writing and Academic Language with the Write Prompt

I recently had the opportunity to work with a group of English language Learners. In the lesson, we looked at conflicts occurring in Syria. I chose a Newsela article about the teenage rebels that fighting in the conflict .

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The purpose of the lesson was for students to use a graphic organizer to track causes and effects of teenagers being involved in the war. You can check out the lesson plan for resources. Every Newsela article comes with a Write prompt, where students respond to a CCSS standard-aligned question. If you have access to Newsela Pro, you are able to edit the Write prompt. For this class, I embedded these sentence frames into the Write prompt in order the scaffold their responses.

  • One factor that has caused teenagers to fight in Syria is __________________. Another reason that teens are fighting is ________________. (Other factors causing teens to fight include ___________).
  • One of the effects of teenagers fighting in Syria is _____________. Additional impacts from teens fighting include _________________________.Screen Shot 2017-03-19 at 3.24.10 PM

2. Scaffolding Complex Texts with Annotations and the Lexile Selector

What are the major three shifts of the English language arts and literacy common core standards is text complexity. Newsela’s Lexile feature allows students to change the complexity of text to suit their comprehension. However, there are times I want to really challenge them with the text at or above their grade level. One way I can do this while still scaffolding students is this adaption of the “Trying on the Most Difficult Text First” strategy from this International Literacy Association publication on close reading.

  • Use Newsela’s annotation questions or create your own annotation questions in a complex version (for your grade level and students) of the article.
  • Ask students to make initial responses to the answers, and annotate their own confusions.
  • Then have students read a more comfortable Lexile version of the article to aid comprehension.
  • Next, have students return to the complex Lexile version and revise their responses.

This method encourages students to tackle rigorous text, while also providing scaffolding for them to grow as readers!

If you want to hear about any of these strategies in depth, access the Newsela “Celebrate the Educator” webinar in which I share 6 strategies for “leveling up” with Newsela.

What are some interesting ways that you are using Newsela Pro features with your students?