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Resources for teaching about current events using New York Times content: articles, quizzes, writing prompts, and more

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Resources for teaching about current events using New York Times content

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Notice and Note Signposts Handout (what students should be thinking as the read)

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Notice and Note Signposts Handout (what students should be thinking as the read)

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Here's a presentation to use when introducing the Notice and Note strategy to students: https://www.lausd.org/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/Domain/593/Nonfiction%20Signpost%202.pdf

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Notice and Note Nonfiction Signposts and Definitions

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Improve math literacy in the classroom with Kelly Turner's Graph of the Week

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The Ultimate Halloween Candy Power Ranking

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The Ultimate Halloween Candy Power Ranking

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This is a one-off that ranks candy, but it's a fantastic piece with lots of content-vocab for stats/research.

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The social contract of Halloween is simple: Provide adequate treats to costumed masses, or be prepared for late-night tricks from those dissatisfied with your offer. To help you avoid that type of vengeance, and to help you make good decisions at the supermarket this weekend, we wanted to figure out what Halloween candy people most prefer. So we devised an experiment: Pit dozens of fun-sized candy varietals against one another, and let the wisdom of the crowd decide which one was best.

While we don't know who exactly voted, we do know this: 8,371 different IP addresses voted on about 269,000 randomly generated matchups. So, not a scientific survey or anything, but a good sample of what candy people like. And here's what they said:

How often did a fun-sized candy of a given type win its matchups against the rest of the field?

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and their spinoffs come out huge here, taking four of the top 10 spots and appearing pretty synonymous with the platonic ideal of Halloween candy. The brand was the best-selling candy in the U.S. as of 2013, and market research showed it was the top snack-sized candy in Halloween times.

But what made some candies more desirable than others? Was it price? Maybe it was just sugar content? Nah, neither really. I pulled fun-sized portion sugar content from a series of dieting websites ( FatSecret, MyFitnessPal), and in cases of particularly hard-to-find candies, I just went to the nearby drugstore. I pulled bulk prices from Candy Warehouse. After a spooooky regression with a truly hellish r-squared, there's no evident link here between price, sugar and perceived quality.

So if it's not price or sugar, there must be something about what's in the candies that make some better and some worse. With the fervency of a stay-at-home dad who recently learned of a child's mild peanut allergy, I scoured the internet for descriptive ingredient data about all the candies in our data set. Were they chocolate? Did they contain peanuts or almonds? How about crisped rice or other biscuit-esque component, like a Kit Kat or malted milk ball? Was it fruit flavored? Was it made of hard candy, like a lollipop or a strawberry bon bon? Was there nougat? What even is nougat? I know I like nougat, but I still have remotely no clue what the damn thing is.

With a full typology in hand and access to some of the most powerful statistical software available on the market, my questions were answered.

That's a lot to take in! In general, here's what this information says. According to the regression, about half the variance observed in the quality can be explained by these nine properties of candy, which isn't great but also isn't awful - and is thus enough for us to work with.

A Halloween candy that has none of those ingredient components would be expected, as a baseline, to win a matchup about 35 percent of the time. Sure enough, this bears out in our data: For giggles we also put in "one dime" and "one quarter" to see how desirable they were, and the dime - which is neither chocolaty, nor fruity, nor full of caramel, peanuts, wafers, et cetera - beat 32 percent of competitors, and the quarter beat 46 percent.

The table adjacent to this paragraph simplifies that "coef." column. If a hypothetical candy had chocolate in it, we'd expect its win percentage to rise by about 20 points. If it's fruity, we'd expect it to rise by 10. If it had nuts, we'd also expect its win percentage to rise by 10, with wafers or crisped rice rising by 9. And nougat and caramel don't bring a ton to the table. A candy being hard - like a lollipop or jawbreaker - actually knocks about 5 points off its win percentage. Whether it's in bar form or a bunch of little candies makes no major difference.

Note that a candy can be one or two or all of these things: A Snickers is a chocolate (+20), peanut (+10), caramel (+3), nougat (+2) candy that we'd expect to have in the ballpark of a 70 percent win rate, and it does in fact have a 77 percent win rate.

Which brings up an obvious question: Can we build the perfect Frankencandy based on this information?

On one hand, no, that's a ridiculous oversimplification of a somewhat scientific process and is likely to result only in an abomination.

On the other hand, that exact ethical dilemma did not stop Dr. Frankenstein, and 'tis the season!

We've got to have chocolate - the win percentage of contenders containing chocolate was about 11 points higher than the average contender and 19 points higher than contenders that did not have chocolate. The same goes for both crispiness and nuttiness: Entrants with peanuts or almonds had win percentages about 13 points higher than the average contender, and ones with crispy wafers or puffed rice were nearly 16 points higher than average. Nougat and caramel are net positives for sure, so throw them in.

Now we get to some major qualitative components. Candies in bar form generally had a higher overall win rate than those in pieces, so we'll want a bar. Yes, fruitiness can be fine, but things that had a fruity taste had a win percentage 11 points lower than those that did not. This is due to the near mutual exclusivity of fruity flavors and chocolate, with Tootsie Pops being the sole exception.

So, in the end, the best Frankencandy has the chocolate of a Hershey bar, the nougat of a Baby Ruth, the caramel of a Milky Way, the peanut butter of a Reese's Cup and the wafer of a Twix, and it's assembled in a castle looming over an Eastern European village. Or if you're trying to make this at home: Maybe take a Twix bar and smush it on a PayDay, or roll a Snickers around in rice crispies.

Call me what you will - the modern Prometheus, a contemporary, pre-diabetic Frankenstein - but I think I have the next big idea in Halloween candy. So what I'm trying to say is, yes, Mr. Wonka, I am available to consult if you're interested in entering the abomination business.

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The Ultimate Halloween Candy Power Ranking

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Video by Christine Laskowski, Tony Chow and Emily Scherer The social contract of Halloween is simple: Provide adequate treats to costumed masses, or be prepared...

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NewsELA: Differentiated texts for all content areas

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NewsELA: Differentiated texts for all content areas

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Differentiated texts aligned to students' NWEA/MAP scores with embedded quizzes and writing prompts. Premium subscription paid by the district.

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It's time to improve literacy skills during social studies instruction and ensure that readers of all abilities have what they need to access grade-level social studies concepts.

Join us on Thursday, December 7 for a look at scaffolded materials that provide extra literacy support while building key social studies concepts and skills.

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Newsela | Content and assessment platform

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Content Aligned To National & State Standard, Flexible To Support Relevant Curriculum. Find the Perfect Piece Of Content For Lessons. Go beyond the book.

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Graphs, maps and charts from The Times — and an invitation to students to discuss them live.

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Graphs, maps and charts from The Times — and an invitation to students to discuss them live.

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Looking to create opportunities for "real-world" writing? Start here to first determine what you want your writers to do.

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538 looks at politics from a statistical perspective. A great way to teach students how to use stats to form a conclusion.

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ABC News - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos

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538 uses statistical analysis - hard numbers - to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, economics, and American society.

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Signal words/stems for each text structure

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Signal words/stems for each text structure

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ReadWorks is built on the science of reading to ensure students can steadily expand their background knowledge, vocabularies, and reading comprehension—helping them become the confident readers they deserve to be

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ReadWorks | Award-Winning, EdTech Nonprofit Organization

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ReadWorks is an edtech nonprofit organization that is committed to helping to solve America's reading comprehension crisis.

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History Lessons | Stanford History Education Group

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This curriculum teaches students how to investigate historical questions by employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading. Instead of memorizing historical facts, students evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on historical issues and learn to make historical claims backed by documentary evidence.

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Resources for teaching social studies using New York Times content

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Resources for teaching social studies using New York Times content

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Resources for teaching science and math using New York Times content

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Lesson plans and teaching resources for teaching science and math using The New York Times

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The OG AOW.

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I teach, I write, I travel, I talk—to help students become better readers and writers.

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Resources for teaching English language arts using New York Times content

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Resources for teaching English language arts using New York Times content

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Find and assign texts that align with specific learning targets or that reflect the themes of your novel unit. Includes embedded Common Core aligned questions throughout.

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CommonLit | CommonLit Library | Browse Content by Theme, Grade Level and More

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View the CommonLit collection and filter by grade level, theme, genre, literacy device and common core standard.

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Benjamin K. Woodcock - Teacher. Writer. Reader. Researcher.

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Article of the Week - Benjamin K. Woodcock

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Article of the Week is a yearlong unit that I have adapted from Kelly Gallagher and developed to fit the needs of my students.

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Find resources and activities for high school learners. Inspire your students with videos, games, and activities aligned to state and national standards.

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Browse standards-aligned resources for your students.

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Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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At the Institute’s core is the Gilder Lehrman Collection, one of the great archives in American history. More than 85,000 items cover five hundred years of American history, from Columbus’s 1493 letter describing the New World through the end of the twentieth century.

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Search | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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A site that teaches students about political bias and rates news sources' bias.

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A site that teaches students about political bias and rates news sources' bias.

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Students can use Costa's levels of questioning to earn 21 points. It can help students if they complete the activity before a discussion.

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An AVID strategy for deep discussions.

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Strategies to help students write across the curriculum.

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A variety of writing strategies

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Helps students understand how to mark a text.

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Professor Sandra Kaplan of USC's Rossier School of Education recommends using the iconic prompts to boost students' critical thinking for any subject matter.

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Icons of Depth and Complexity and Universal Concept Strategies

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Use this strategy to encourage a close reading of any text.

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Available via Springboard, Zinc offers a wide variety of texts aligned with ELA standards.

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Browse our library of strategies that support interactive and engaging learning that helps students make stronger connections and deeper understanding of text and topics.

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Monthly articles with high-level writing prompts to engage students in conversation about real-world issues.

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Building educators' capacity to produce
college-ready performance
for all students.

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Argument-Centered Education designs highly specific, carefully adapted argument-centered curriculum and instructional resources for its partner-schools, and in close collaboration with its partner-teachers. These resources can be placed in five categories. The categories are described below, with typical examples provided. There are literally hundreds more examples in a library expanding weekly available to Argument-Centered Education partners.

These range very widely but are all unified by integrating academic argument key components into core curriculum, so that all students in a classroom are engaged in efficient, focused argumentation on central questions in the units teachers are currently teaching.

Samples from math:

There are times when the most pedagogically useful and productive way to develop students' understanding of and proficiency with academic argument is through gamification. Argument-Centered Education has a slate of academic argument games that target individual key components in argument-centered pedagogy.

Samples from social science:

Rapid Fire Evidence
Identification Format

Rapid Fire Evidence
Identification Clues

Argumentative Writing

A substantial portion of all Argument-Centered Education resources culminate in college-directed argumentative writing projects. Argument in the classroom can be understood as a preparation for more informed, more critical-thinking rich, more engaging academic writing; an argument-centered approach in the classroom is the best approach for helping to improving students' writing.

Samples from science:

Argument-Centered Education has also developed argumentative writing modules applicable across literacy instruction. These 'analytic comparison' exercises are for middle-schoolers learning to use textual evidence and engage in refutation in their writing.

Samples from writing:

Multi-Sided Debates

Educators very often express to us that they have tried debating in the classroom but with disappointing results. Argument-Centered Education has a wealth of resources and experience to help ensure that classroom debates are high points during the school year, far exceeding expectations, building an academic culture, and engaging all students in rigorous and standards-aligned work.
One category of classroom debating resources we use are those built around an issue that has multiple sides or several possible best answers. These debating formats are often organized with students working in groups to defend one of those positions in relation to the others.

Samples from English language arts:

Samples from physical/health education:

The other category of classroom debates is the one many people think of when they think of debating: the two-sided or binary debates (pro/con, point/counterpoint, affirmative/negative) on a carefully-formulated debatable question or issue. Argument-Centered Education has innovated formats in this category to ensure that they include the proper steps of argument-building and preparation, that they involve all students in a class (not solely the debater-speakers), and that they are truly rigorous.

Samples from social science:

Samples from English language arts:

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Argument-Centered Education designs highly specific, carefully adapted argument-centered curriculum and instructional resources for its partner-schools, and in close collaboration with its partner-teachers. These resources can be placed in five categories. The categories are described below, with typical examples provided. There are literally hundreds more examples in a library expanding weekly available to Argument-Centered Education partners.

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Democratic Knowledge Project: Current Events Toolkit

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Democratic Knowledge Project: Current Events Toolkit

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The Current Events Toolkit provides teachers with materials to help their students think through and understand complex and sometimes controversial current events. It includes tools and guidance for engaging in initial conversations about current events and for digging deeper into current events topics.

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Current Events Toolkit - Democratic Knowledge Project

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Current Events Toolkit ABOUT THIS RESOURCE:The Current Events Toolkit provides teachers with materials to help their students think through and understand complex and sometimes controversial current events. It includes tools and guidance for engaging in initial conversations about current events and for digging deeper into current events topics. Additional guides and recommended resources for discussing

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Guide for General Discussion of Current Events

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Guide for General Discussion of Current Events

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Current Events Toolkit - Guide for General Discussions

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Approaching Discussions through the Four Points Structuring conversations on sensitive topics can be difficult for many reasons. One thing that can be particularly challenging is managing the different needs of students in these conversations, and the different ways they want to talk about the