It’s almost time for students and teachers to hit the classrooms again. We’re committed to making your first day of school and beyond a breeze. That’s why we’ve strengthened our products with a host of new updates that help you build background knowledge, drive literacy across the curriculum, and see the impact our tools have on your students’ accelerated growth. Get ahead before the first bell rings and stay ahead all year long with these new features:

• Administrators

  • Content promotion

  • Implementation guides

  • Improved reporting

• Teachers

  • Improved reporting

  • New scaffolds

  • Search and discovery features

  • New instructional content and interactive activities

Administrators

Explore our new admin features to help you share content your teachers want to see, ensure everyone gets the most out of your Newsela subscription, and better track students’ performance.

Content Promotion

Have you ever wished you could customize your teachers’ Newsela experience to match your district’s curricular priorities and instructional goals? With content promotion, now you can! Enhance your teachers’ experience by showing preferred curricular-aligned content for the following Newsela products and features:

• Newsela ELA

  • Curriculum Complements

  • Novel and Book Studies

  • Themes and topics

  • Content types

  • Specific reading skills

• Newsela Social Studies

  • Curriculum Complements

  • Courses

  • Topics

• Newsela Science

  • Curriculum Complements

  • Courses

  • Supplemental collections

  • Topics

Implementation Guides

Implementation guides clarify how to partner with Newsela and give your teachers the tools to use our products successfully. These in-product guides help you ensure high-impact and successful Newsela implementation and usage. Inside, you’ll find helpful resources that cover topics like:

• Key team members

• Integrations

• Professional learning

• Communications

• Instructional best practices

• Measuring success

• Content promotion

New Scaffolds

Explore new scaffolds and features that support reading comprehension across Newsela’s products:

Encourage close reading with checks for understanding

Teachers now have the option to add four AI-generated checks for understanding throughout informational and news texts. They require students to slow down and ensure they understand what they’ve read before continuing with a text.

Close reading helps students practice language and vocabulary development, focus on key skills, and think critically about what they’re reading.

Search and discover features for teachers

Find exactly what you need when you need it with global updates to Newsela’s search and discovery features:

Discover and explore content easily with the global navigation toolbar

Our new toolbar makes it easy for you to find exactly what you’re looking for from any page in the Newsela platform. Subject-specific browse pages take you right to the content and activities you need for a specific class. Plus, you can search directly from the content toolbar to find what you need at any moment with fewer clicks.

Find the content you need with expanded search filters

Search for just the information you want and nothing you don’t with our updated search filters. The redesigned search page has a brand new toolbar that lets you filter for resources that fit your exact instructional needs more easily. Filter by:

• Standards

• Reading skills

• Grade level

• Reading level

• Language

• Instructional features

And more!

New Instructional Content and Interactive Activities

Get even more resources to build background knowledge, include diverse perspectives, and practice literacy skills with more great content and activity offerings across Newsela’s products.

Support your youngest readers with K-2 content 

Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, and Newsela Science now offer age-appropriate informational texts for your youngest readers. Find them by selecting “Texts for K-2 Classrooms from the bottom of the lefthand menu on your ELA, social studies, or science browse page. 

We designed these texts to reflect front-of-class instruction rather than independent reading to give your youngest students a whole class literacy learning experience. These texts don’t include traditional Newsela student activities like quizzes, writing prompts, or Power Words.

Introduce more diverse perspectives with expanded seasonal and holiday collections 

For back-to-school season and beyond, we continue to curate diverse, timely content for holidays, heritage months, and other important events teachers want to cover in their lessons. 

In Newsela ELA and Newsela Social Studies, we’ve added content for events like Pride Month, Juneteenth, and the Fourth of July. Stay tuned for continuous seasonal content updates throughout the school year.

Build background knowledge on classics and new favorites with additions to our Novel and Book Studies collection

You asked and we listened! Thanks to customer requests, we’ve added even more novel studies to our Novel and Book Studies collection. Check out these and more of our almost 500 titles to build background knowledge with your students:

• “Two Degrees” by Alan Gratz

• “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline

• “The Parker Inheritance” by Varian Johnson

• “I Will Always Write Back” by Caitlin Alifirenka, Liz Welch, and Martin Ganda

• “Amari and the Night Brothers” by B.B. Alston

Introduce and explore history with the Elementary Social Studies Spotlights collection 

Our new Elementary Spotlights for Newsela Social Studies cover topics upper elementary students love, like holidays, animals, sports, and wacky history. They’re designed to push students to read closely, collaborate, and create. Lesson guides help teachers find resources and suggestions to introduce, explore, and demonstrate knowledge in the classroom.

Make history interactive with our primary source + Formative starter packs 

It’s now even easier and more engaging for Newsela Social Studies users to browse primary sources. Newsela’s curriculum experts created pre-built, vetted, and standards-aligned Formative activities for over 250 primary source texts. Use them to have students practice source analysis skills like contextualization and analyzing bias. 

To access the activities, create or sign in to your Formative account. Then visit the “Teach this article” panel in the primary source you want to teach and click the Formative activity. Your Formative account opens in a new window, allowing you to save the template, customize the activity, or assign it as is.

Kickstart the back-to-school season with Newsela

Ready to explore and test out our latest features? Log in to your Newsela account to get started!

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