Forty-four states and United States territories have adopted the Common Core Standards and, according to this recent Times article, one major change teachers can expect to see is more emphasis on reading “informational,” or nonfiction, texts across subject areas:
While English classes will still include healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading more nonfiction texts as they get older, to prepare them for the kinds of material they will read in college and careers. In the fourth grade, students should be reading about the same amount from “literary” and “informational” texts, according to the standards; in the eighth grade, 45 percent should be literary and 55 percent informational, and by 12th grade, the split should be 30/70.
Well, The New York Times and The Learning Network are here to help.
Since the Common Core definition of “informational text” includes pretty much everything The Times publishes, from articles, essays and opinion piece to “diverse media and multimedia” such as photographs, infographics and video, reading the paper can prepare your students for their futures in myriad ways.
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.
As always, please let us know if you have more ideas!
Easy Ways to Weave in The Times
1. Have students scan just the front page or homepage daily or weekly in order to:
- 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?”
2. Augment a unit with a great photograph, infographic or video. SearchTimes multimedia to find content related to your curriculum. Our Teaching With Infographics collection might also help.
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.
5. Have students start academic research with Times Topics pages. Use our post about 10 ways to use The Times for research to learn more.
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.
8. Read how real teachers have woven in The Times in our series of Great Ideas from Educators. Or submit your own!
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.
10. Have your students participate in our contests. This July we’re running aSummer Reading contest, last winter we had a quotation contest, and we’ve just wrapped up our second Found Poetry challenge.
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:
Both of these techniques “activate schema” by asking students to react in some way to a series of controversial statements about a topic they are about to study. In Four Corners, students move around the room to show their degree of agreement or disagreement with various statements — about, for instance, the health risks of tanning, or the purpose of college, or dystopian teen literature. An anticipation guide does the same thing, though generally students simply react in writing to a list of statements on a handout. In this warm-up to a lesson on some of the controversies currently raging over school reform, students can use the statements we provide in either of these ways.
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:
A rich way to build background on a topic at the beginning of a unit (or showcase learning at the end), Gallery Walks for this purpose are usually teacher-created collections of images, articles, maps, quotations, graphs and other written and visual texts that can immerse students in information about a broad subject. Students circulate through the gallery, reading, writing and talking about what they see. We’ve suggested this strategy many times, on topics from the earthquake in Haiti to a lesson suggested for the day after the historic election of Barack Obama. Other examples include Gallery Walks on the history of Israel, the history of space exploration and to memorialize an anniversary of Sept. 11.
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 ishere. One example of how we’ve used the technique can be found in a lesson on the “unschooling” movement.
Text-on-Text:
This technique encourages close reading of a series of short texts via a method of group annotation, and is another way to introduce a topic — or to work with key materials during a unit. We used it most recently in a lesson onthe role of the Mississippi River in United States history, and included a variation on it in “Viewer, She Marries Him: Comparing ‘Jane Eyre’ in Literature and Film.”
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 thedebt 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:
- Making Text-to-Text/Text-to-Self/Text-to-World connections
- Charting Debatable Issues
- Listing Facts/Questions/Responses
- Identifying Cause and Effect
- Supporting Opinions With Facts
- Tracking The Five W’s and an H
- Identifying Multiple Points of View
- Identifying a Problem and Solution
- Comparing With a Venn Diagram
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.
Certain Times series illustrate these text structures well. For instance, theFixes blog explores solutions to major social problems such as the problem oflack of playgrounds in poor neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, articles about cause and effect can be found in every section of the paper every day since much of journalism involves tracking the ripple effects of big news events or societal trends. The tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan, for instance, has affected everything in that nation from smartphone production to the fishing industry to the electricity available to light up famous landmarks.
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:
Almost any student can find a “way in” with this strategy, which involves reacting to a text by creating one page that shows an illustration, question and quote that sum up some key aspect of what a student learned. Here aredirections for the strategy, and here are ways we’ve used it to learn about the role of dopamine, to consider America’s role in the world and think aboutKurt Vonnegut’s body of work.
“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:
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 planstudents 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 inthis 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.”
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