I love NewsELA
If you teach English as a second language or Spanish and you aren’t subscribed to the daily newsletter from NewsELA, you are missing out. I love NewsELA and I don’t even do all of the amazing things it is capable of. Every morning, I get a little email from them, and the title of the email lets me know what the articles inside are going to be about. If something grabs my attention, or relates to something we’ve been chatting about in one of my classes I open the email… if not it goes into my trash. I am well aware of what a busy teacher’s inbox looks like, but these are worth it. A couple of weeks ago, I got the email and noticed an interesting article about “perros callejeros” or street dogs. NewsELA offers some (not all) of their articles in Spanish. I love love love this, because they are current events or articles that the students find compelling and they’re already written for me in Spanish. If you are familiar with Martina’s News Summaries, these are very similar to that. My students read her summaries for FVR time, and the NewsELA articles I use for group reading or whole class reading and discussion.
I did this article with multiple classes (I had to adapt it for my lower levels). I introduced it with one or two of these slides (depending on the level of the class). The slides were meant to catch their interest and they provoked some PQA too. In one class we spent almost the entire time discussing our favorite breeds of animals. Some of my classes were watching CoCo. I had bought Martina’s materials for it (well worth it) and it was perfect because the day before this we had read about Xoloscuintles and talked a lot about Dante in the movie. Then we had this to read! The articles are linked in the slide show or you can find them below.
After we did that, we watched the video below, which is also linked in the slide show above. We watched the video at .75 speed so they could understand more. My higher classes felt VERY proud with how much they understood, and with the background knowledge we had built from the article, my lower levels could understand parts of it too! ALL of my classes LOVED this! I highly recommend it! 🙂
If you don’t want to wait for the newsletter and you just want to search for Spanish articles on NewsELA, simply visit the website. Then click on the search bar and click directly on Spanish or click the magnifying glass and then in the advanced search click on Spanish in the left hand column. There are already over 1300 Spanish articles on their site. Here is a gif to teach you how to do it. I have a regular free account with them.
Next, you need to choose the lexile level, as I showed you above. I almost always choose the lowest lexile level and then from there, I create embedded readings or just one scaffolded reading that better matches the level of my kids.
If you didn’t already know about NewsELA I hope your mind is blown. I am certain your students will love many of the articles they write, and you will LOVE the time it saves for you!
Until next time,
HAPPY WEEKEND, and HAPPY TEACHING!
Love,
La Maestra Loca
THIS IS so great, thank you! It saved me in the afterschool ELA intervention I teach. I couldn’t figure out, though, how to assign an article on the class page that I had the students join. Do I have to subscribe to do this?
Awesome question. Honestly, I am not sure. I have only used the “Free” version. I would imagine that subscribing would be well worth it if you planned on using this frequently. I love that new articles are posted daily. 🙂 I only use it to supplement what I am already doing in class.