Newsela - Non-fiction Articles for Student at Their Reading Levels

Newsela is a great resource for teachers in all content areas.  One of the biggest challenges teachers face, especially with the implementation of the Common Core, is finding appropriate, grade-level non-fiction for students to read.  Newsela helps meet that need by providing an expansive variety of news articles on a wide variety of topics, and the best part is that each article can be read at five different lexile levels.  This provides an easy way to differentiate within the classroom and allow students to read at their level, leading to greater understanding.

There are thousands of articles available on the site, in a wide range of subject areas, including: War & Peace (great for social studies!), Science, Money, Law, Health, Arts, and Sports.  When opening each article, students can then choose from five different lexile reading levels. And it's easy to change between levels so if an article is too hard, they can change to a lower level.  Additionally, many of the articles have comprehension quizzes so students can get an idea of how well they understand the material.  Or if teachers don't have electronic access all the time in class, articles can be downloaded as PDFs or printed to use in class with students.  There is a wonderful article linked below on how to use Newsela with Google Docs to create reading groups with your students and have them actually comment and engage in discussion on the articles.

Overall, Newsela can provide teachers a resource for finding and using short, non-fiction articles in class to work on reading and critical thinking skills.  While the site does have a paid option with features like assigning articles to students and tracking their quiz results, the free version provides plenty of resources and as the link below shows, there are workarounds for having students engage in discussion about the articles, even without the paid features.  So if you are looking for more non-fiction reading options for your students, check out Newsela!

Link to article about using Newsela with Google Docs - You should read this!
Video about Newsela  (Just watch the first 3 minutes for a good introduction to what Newsela is)