Support your youngest readers with age-appropriate informational texts in Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, and Newsela Science.

Texts designed to reflect front-of-class instruction rather than independent reading.

✔️ A whole class literacy learning experience

✔️ Read-alouds at one appropriate level for all students

✔️ Authentic texts to build background knowledge and engagement

Find the K-2 collection on the browse page of any of our premium subjects from the bottom of the left-hand menu.

You can also search and filter to find the content you need

Articles in the K-2 collections in ELA and Social Studies do not feature the lexile level toggle nor instructional activities as they are designed specifically for front of class instruction.

Other content for this grade range is available in Curriculum Complements that designate K-2 instructional alignment.

Outside of our explicit K-2 collections, you can use our search filters to find content on the topic you are teaching at a grade level appropriate for your students. In addition to searching by reading level, this enables you to also choose a reading skill of focus that will be assessed in the article quiz. This could be an opportunity for you to engage students in a class think-aloud or in small group instruction to orally assess specific reading skills.

There are steps we can take as teachers to model important cognitive strategies that increase comprehension. The following strategies are all research-based and have been proven effective with all types of learners.

The first activity, occuring BEFORE students read an article, is called Previewing and Predicting.

You can use Present Mode to model for students how you preview a text before beginning to read. Present mode removes lots of the extraneous information and variables that are only for teacher-consideration, and it centers the actual text. As you preview the text with students, have them pay attention to:

Ask students to predict what the text will be about and what they’ll learn. If the title makes that obvious, ask students to predict which details might be emphasized and what the author’s purpose might be for writing the piece. What bias might we expect? Is there anything we should prepare ourselves for before we start reading?

For another BEFORE reading exercise, try this fun warm-up that gets students activating their background knowledge on a topic they’ll next learn about. Grab words from the article level that students will read and ask them to assemble them into sentences related to the new topic. As students connect terms into logical sentences, they’ll be priming their minds to engage in the current article and learn more about its' topic. Newsela tools like AI-generated Key Terms, tier 3 vocabulary found in the body of the text (and Power Words for ELA subscribers) can help cut down on teacher planning time.

A couple of notes:

We can use the suggested Before Reading Activity to pose questions to the class to activate prior knowledge. These questions are a great way to get students talking in small groups or pairs as they think about what they’re going to read.

Now, let’s focus our attention on strategies we can employ WHILE students are reading. One effective strategy is teacher modeling of a reading skill through think-alouds.

You choose the text, read it out loud, and stop to articulate for your students what strategy you’re using to make sense of words, sentences, sections, and whole texts.

One way to do this is to view the text in Present Mode with the Paragraph Count ON, and the Font Size on LARGE to show students how you stop and consider pieces of information.

Going back to our previous example, simply thinking aloud about your own predictions shows your students how to apply that strategy and what parts of the text influence your predictions. Like most new strategies, teacher modeling is the first step towards seeing the behavior adopted by students. With adequate examples, they’ll be able to begin independently applying those same strategies.

We can continue to steer students towards desirable reading behaviors by modifying the text with Newsela highlights and annotations, so that students hear and see their teacher’s voice in the text WHILE reading.

One scalable way to encourage student think-alouds is to use stop signs that prompt your students to pause and monitor their comprehension. Would they be able to tell a friend what they had just read in one or two sentences without looking back at the text? If so, they should try it! A study done in 1992 found that “training in think-aloud improved children’s ability to monitor their comprehension while reading” (Baumann, Seifert-Kessel, & Jones, 1992).

Students can do this in partner groups, taking turns on think-aloud duty at each stop sign. Follow these steps to set up an activity like this one:

Finally, let’s think about how we can use graphic organizers to support students DURING and AFTER reading.

They’re a really important tool for helping students represent information visually. In doing so, they wrestle with concepts, vocabulary, and text structures that improve their ability to make meaning from complex texts. Newsela’s Graphic Organizers Instructional Set organizes some of our most popular resources all in one place. You might consider saving or copying this set so you have it for later.

Source

Baumann, J. F., Seifert-Kessell, N., & Jones, L. A. (1992). Effect of think-aloud instruction on elementary students' comprehension monitoring abilities. Journal of Reading Behavior, 24(2), 143–172.