Here are suggestions for making The Times a low-stress part of your classroom routine, followed by literacy strategies to help address the Standards before, during, and after reading Times content with your students.
Easy Ways to Weave in The Times
- Take our daily News Quiz, which is based on that day’s print front page.
- Choose an article to read in depth, perhaps using our reading log.
- Learn vocabulary, keeping track of it here. Reading just the front page of The New York Times every day introduces scores of SAT-level words in context. On June 14, for instance, you could find vibrant, fissure, unscathed, sectarian, volatile, inert, pretext and many more.
- Practice making quick connections — to another text, to their own personal life, to something they’re studying in school, or to another trend, controversy or topic they’ve heard or read about. This graphic organizercan help.
- Play Front Page Bingo with any day’s Times to find articles that fit criteria like “A story that might benefit from a chart or graph, and why” or “If an alien landed here and read only this page of this paper, what is one conclusion it might draw about human beings?”
3. Use
Times Search to put in keywords (“Macbeth,” “World War II,”) and find articles that connect to your curriculum. You can choose to search just recent editions of the paper, or go back to any date since 1851.
4. Have students respond online to our daily
Student Opinion question, each of which links to a recent, high-interest Times article. Since we keep all our questions open, they can also scroll through and choose the ones they like best.
6. Quickly find Times resources for often-taught subjects with our
Teaching Topics page, a living index to collections we’ve made on topics from immigration to “To Kill a Mockingbird” to global warming to bullying.
7. Have students play
World History Standards Bingo to see how the same trends, patterns and concepts studied in global history are echoed in today’s news.
9. Get our
e-mail, or follow us on
Twitter or
Facebook, to quickly scan what’s new on The Learning Network daily. When big news breaks, we nearly always post teaching suggestions and useful links within 24 hours.
Reading Strategies
The Commom Core Standards demand that students in classes across the curriculum “determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text” as well as “summarize complex concepts, processes, or information presented in a text by paraphrasing them in simpler but still accurate terms.”
Once you’ve chosen some Times content to use, here are classroom-tested, hands-on strategies for helping students process, analyze, evaluate and summarize an “informational text” and its ideas — before, during and after reading.
Each technique, many of which use writing to help students grapple with what they are reading, is linked to an article, activity sheet or lesson on The Learning Network so you can see the technique “in action.”
Preview Text Types and Text Features:
Make sure students know what kind of text they’re about to read, what to expect from it, and how to use additional information, such as hyperlinked sources or appended graphics, to learn more.
For instance, how is an
Op-Ed or editorial different from a hard news article? What is a feature story? Where do reviews appear? What information can the various graphics and photographs included “inline,” or in the left-hand column, of an article (like this one on the
“The Facts (and Fiction) of Tornadoes,”) give a reader? To introduce students to how The Times “works” overall, our
Scavenger Hunt might come in handy.
Four Corners and Anticipation Guides:
Quick-Writes and Journaling:
Ask students to “think in writing” about a topic you’ll be studying by jotting their thoughts quickly. (This can obviously be done at any point in a lesson, though starting with writing is a technique we’ve used regularly — for instance in our recent lesson,
“What Would Cleopatra Do? Drawing Lessons From History or Literature.”) Students might then read their writing aloud in pairs or small groups after they’ve finished.
Gallery Walks:
The One-Question Interview:
A teacher or the students themselves can invent the questions used in this technique, which makes for a lively warm-up and helps learners practice listening and note-taking as well as introducing them to a topic before reading about it. Teacher directions are
here, while the sheet students will need is
here. One example of how we’ve used the technique can be found in a lesson on
the “unschooling” movement.
Text-on-Text:
K/W/L Charts and Concept Mapping:
Most teachers are familiar with these related techniques, in which students brainstorm what they know, or think they know, about a topic before studying it. We have a
re-usable K/W/L chart, and have suggested using it on topics including
AIDS and
the midterm elections.
List/Group/Label:
One of our favorite pre-reading exercises, this activity, which might seem to be simply about vocabulary-building, is actually a powerful way to help students prepare to read a difficult text by sorting and categorizing some of the information they will find there before they begin.
Here are directions, but reading how the technique works with articles on everything from the
debt crisis in Greece to
Edgar Allan Poe and the
Large Hadron Collider can help show how flexible it is.
Graphic Organizers:
In our popular series,
“Great Ways to Teach Any Day’s Times,” we have several kinds of graphic organizer that students can fill out alone, in pairs or in small groups as they read. They can also. of course, complete them after they have finished. These include:
Text Annotation:
A common reading strategy, we detail many ways to annotate in
this lesson,“Briefly Noted: Practicing Useful Annotation Strategies.”
A related strategy, used in
this lesson, is an annotation system known as the “Traffic Light,” in which students color code text red, yellow and green to evaluate what they’re reading in some way.
Text Cues and Text Types:
Make students aware of common “signal words” and their text structures.
“Nonfiction Matters,”, a well-known text by Stephanie Harvey,
lists many of these in an appendix, including words that signal writing about cause and effect, comparison and contrast, sequence, and problem/solution.
Once students are aware of common journalistic text structures like these, challenge them to find as many examples in one day’s paper as they can.
Reading Aloud:
One technique that is well-suited to Times content is reading aloud — and we’re firmly of the belief that no one is ever too old to listen. Every year we add to our list of
Great Read-Alouds from The Times, on subjects from science to crime and punishment to race, gender and identity.
You might try reading aloud a Times article that fits your curriculum and stopping occasionally to have students “turn and talk” or do some quick writing about what they’re hearing and thinking.
The sky’s the limit! There is no way we can round up 13 years of lesson plans to cull all our suggestions for how students might respond to Times content once they’ve read it, but here are some of our favorite techniques:
The One-Pager:
“Popcorn Reads”:
Invite students to choose significant words, phrases or whole sentences from a text or texts to read aloud in random fashion, without explanation. Though this may sound pointless until you try it, it is an excellent way for students to “hear” some of the high points or themes of a text emerge, and has the added benefit of being an activity any reader can participate in easily. See how we used it in the lesson,
Opinion Through the Ages: Exploring 40 Years of New York Times Op-Eds, for example.
Graphic Organizers:
More from our
Great Ideas for Any Day’s Times collection, here are some fun ways students can summarize, analyze and react to what they’ve just read:
Found Poems:
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably noticed that we love this technique, and run a
student contest every April devoted to it. We’ve also suggested using it in multiple lesson plans over the years, including this one in which students create found poetry from the
Times obituary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is a wonderful way to have students “construct meaning” from a rich text.
Illustrations:
Have students create illustrations for texts they’re reading, either in the margins as they go along, or after they’ve finished. The point of the exercise is not, of course, to create beautiful drawings, but to help them understand and retain the information they learn. For instance, in
this lesson plan students illustrate their choice of science concept, through a cartoon, graphic or even a comic strip.
Fishbowl Discussions:
So many Times articles lend themselves to classroom discussion. One technique we like that structures discussion so that everyone has a chance to speak is the “fishbowl,” which can be done in several different ways. In
this lesson students use it to discuss the Holocaust and how it is taught, while in
this lesson students fishbowl to argue the notion of an “age of responsibility.”
Reader’s Theater:
This technique, a way of dramatizing a story by turning the information of a particular text into a script, and then performing it in an impromptu setting, can easily be used with Times content. For example, in
this lesson on Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, the site of the historic, American-led “Berlin Airlift” of 1948, students use primary documents, from The Times and elsewhere, to dramatize the story.
This lesson uses the life of Thurgood Marshall as an example for students to adapt. In a simpler version of the technique, at the beginning of
this lesson we invite students to read aloud, monologue-style, the stories of Times journalists who have confronted risk in doing their jobs.
Frozen Tableaux:
Though it’s possible we’ve only used this strategy once, in
a lesson on Shakespeare, it is a method students enjoy that can “get The New York Times on its feet.”
Update: Nov. 14, 2011 | “The Future of Reading” and “Beyond the Book Report”
We’ve published two posts that can augment the ideas on this page:
And in
Beyond the Book Report, we new suggest ways for students to respond to literature using New York Times models.
