Newsela - Great Resource for Non-Fiction Articles

Getting Started with Newsela

Tracking Student Progress in Newsela

**Updated** I want to update this post after using this tool with a few 5th grade teachers in our district.  Newsela is even better than I thought!  You have the ability to assign students articles, but they can also choose their own.  From the teacher dashboard you can track which articles they have read.  There is also a new feature which allows students to annotate on the actual article.  Teachers can view student annotations from the dashboard and reply back to them.  This would be such a great tool to allow readers to track their thinking while reading. 

Close Reading Poster:

When I was in the classroom I was always trying to find non-fiction articles that connected to what we were learning about.  I was working with a team of teachers yesterday and Nicole Vagle shared a great resource to access free non-fiction articles.  The site is Newsela - "Newsela is an innovative way for students to build reading comprehension with nonfiction that's always relevant: daily news." This site has articles for grades 3-12.  You can use this for whole group instruction or create accounts for students and assign articles for them to read.

Here are some of the really cool features this site has to offer:

•  Articles written at multiple levels of complexity-as a teacher you can choose a version of the article to fit each student
• It has quizzes aligned to the Common Core to track students progress
• Newsela also has a teacher dashboard to track Common Core mastery, review quiz results, and assign articles