Newsela in the Spanish class

As I have stated before, I love my PLC!  And really- my enthusiasm is unjustified.  Many times, it is great to sit with educators across all subjects and grade levels.  One Social Studies teacher asked for ideas on how to allow students to analyze news articles.  A math teacher mentioned Newsela… then we found out that it exists in Spanish!

In the menu bar, you can search for Spanish text sets.

The text sets then bring up different themes:

• Science
• US Politics
• Health
• Race in the US
• Food
• Schools

Each theme brings up different articles.  I selected “food,” and there were articles with various themes such as pizza contributing to obesity, food trucks in Kabul and the “five second rule.”  There were 10 articles on food; however, there were 20 articles on school life.  I choose the article on the five second rule.  Then, you can change the difficulty level of the article:

The different levels change the vocabulary used, the length of the sentences and the organization.  Easier levels are shorter and have simple headings.  Students can “write” a summary of it or they can take a quiz on the material.  I did notice that for easier levels, the questions are more identification whereas higher levels are questions about summaries.

This would be a good homework assignment!  Also, it would be interesting to give the students harder levels as they go.  You could also print some articles out to include in an FVR library.  You could also give students a variety of articles and allow them to choose and present one of them to the class.  I would also say that these articles still can be pretty difficult.  I would use them primarily with a strong level 2 class- or towards the end of Spanish 2.  They would work well in levels 3 and above.  I am excited to use this in my own classes!