Using Newsela in the Classroom! Brandon Rutt

What is Newsela? Newsela is a free website that offers news articles designed to enhance the learning experience in the classroom.

How is it different than CNN, etc.? The articles are broken down into sub- categories like War & Peace, Science, Kids, Money, etc. The articles are professionally written and reliable sources for news. They are current and offer a wide variety of news for students to explore. Short quizzes are available for each news article.

Most Importantly… ALL of the Newsela articles can be broken down into different Lexile levels ranging from MAX, 1110L, 1020L, 810L, and 660L.

What is a Lexile measure? A Lexile measure is a valuable piece of information about either an individual's reading ability or the difficulty of a text, like a book or magazine article.

How can I use it in my classroom? Step 1 – Administer Rasinski’s Three Minute Reading Assessment to each and every student in your classroom.  This will take some time; however, this step is crucial in order to discover just how developed your students are as readers.

How can I use it in my classroom? Step 2 – Based on the three minute assessment results, assign news articles of the appropriate lexile difficulty to the appropriate students.  The information provided in the news articles does not change based on the lexile difficulty. The meat and potatoes of the article are there regardless the difficulty.

How can I use it in my classroom? Step 3 – Use the online testing feature of Newsela to quiz the students upon completion of the reading.  This is a great way to quickly assess how the students grasped important concepts within the news article.  Newsela conveniently compiles testing data into a spreadsheet format that can be monitored by the teacher.

How can I use it in my classroom? Step 4 – Adjust lexile difficulty accordingly once testing data is reviewed.  If you notice that a student is doing very well on the quizzes, bump the lexile level up on their news article.  Inversely, if you notice the student is doing poorly on the quizzes, reduce the lexile difficulty of their news articles.  From the beginning of the year to the end of the year, you should notice a gain in each and every students lexile reading level.  Also, they will be gaining valuable knowledge along the way.

Reflection Very rarely do we actually look at our students to determine whether or not they actually understand what they are reading. We simply give them something to read, and bang our heads against the wall when they don’t perform well on whatever assessment we give to them. This website helps them along the way.