Welcome to the brand new Learning Network! Here is what we’re offering this school year and how to use it.
Happy academic year 2015-16! Here’s what we’ve got on our blog and how you can use it, whether you’re a teacher, a student (of any age) or a parent. (And here’s a PDF of this entire post so you can share what you learn.)
Over the summer we added some new things and tweaked some old. Below you’ll find details about our brand-new Film Club, our revamped News Q’s and Word of the Day features, and the new student contests we’ll be offering this year.
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And remember: The Learning Network and everything we publish, as well as all the content from The Times that we link to, is free and accessible without a digital subscription.
1. Find new, Common Core-aligned lesson plans every week.
Image from our Text to Text lesson that pairs “The Catcher in the Rye” with a Sunday Review article, “The Case for Delayed Adulthood.”
We publish at least one new lesson plan each week of the school year, on topics drawn from front-page news as well as from other sections of The New York Times.
Use them to make connections to current events in your social studies or E.L.A. classroom; incorporate recent research or new Times features into STEM lessons; draw on both Times archival articles and current popular culture to teach literature or history; or teach a cross-curricular skill or strategy via a Times article or feature.
We also post at least one monthly “Text to Text” lesson, in which we pair an often-taught work in history, literature, science or math with a piece from The Times that illuminates it in some way.
To quickly scan all the lessons we published in 2014-15, visit these links:
- Year-End Roundup | Language Arts, Journalism, the Arts and Academic Skills
- Year-End Roundup | Science, Health, Technology and Math
- Year-End Roundup | Social Studies, History, Geography and Civics
2. Comment on our daily Student Opinion question.
Each week thousands of teenagers from around the world post their thoughts to our student questions, and teachers tell us it’s a great place for them to engage with current events, practice good “Web citizen” skills and hone the ability to make and defend arguments.
Since we read all comments submitted, and won’t publish them unless they meet our standards, it’s also a safe place to post.
Our new commenting system makes it easy for users to reply to each other, or recommend each other’s posts. We hope teachers and students will experiment with these features this school year.
Assign your students (13 and up, please) a particular question or have them scroll through all our questions to find one that interests them. We keep most open for response indefinitely, including everything on this handy list of the 183 questions we asked during the 2014-15 school year.
3. Participate in a live visual-literacy discussion each week via “What’s Going On in This Picture?”
We run this popular feature, which demands critical thinking and evidence-gathering about Times photojournalism, with our partners Visual Thinking Strategies.
Every Monday morning we post a photograph without its caption or other identifying information and ask students to think deeply about “What’s Going On in This Picture?”
From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time, your students are invited to join young people from around the world to post in our comments section about what they see and why, while a moderator from V.T.S. acts as a facilitator to further the conversation. On Friday mornings each week this year, we will reveal information about the origins of the photo and what it depicts.
Here is a post featuring 10 of the most intriguing images we’ve used, along with teaching tips for using this feature to strengthen visual thinking and close reading skills.
4. Keep up with the news of the day through our interactive news quizzes.
Want a quick, fun way to make sure you always know something about the most important news of the week?
Take our 10-question interactive Weekly News Quiz to look back at the news of the previous week and forward to the week ahead, to learn additional context about each question — and to see how you stack up against other participants.
5. Find a daily mini-lesson on an important or compelling news story with our revamped News Q’s feature.
#BlackTwitter After #Ferguson
On the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death, three prominent activists read their tweets from the past year and reflect on the challenges and legacy of the Black Lives Matter movement.
By BRENT McDONALD and JOHN WOO on Publish Date August 10, 2015.Video from a recent edition of News Q’s.
For years we chose a Times story daily and posed the basic “6 Q’s About the News” — Who, What, Where, When, Why and How — about it.
This year, thanks to feedback from teachers, we’re going a step further.
Now each News Q’s edition includes a short “before reading” question or activity to help students warm up; five or so “after reading” comprehension questions that ask for both “right there” answers and higher-level thinking via evidence from the text; a “going further” activity for teachers who would like to make the topic a full lesson plan; and a series of related links to find what else we and The Times have published on the topic.
Teachers tell us they use the feature both as a structure for lesson plans as well as for as homework and extra-credit assignments students can complete on their own.
6. Learn what happened On This Day in History.
Visit On This Day every day to read an original Times article about an important event that took place on that day in history, or scroll through the archive to look up your birthday or another special day.
7. Compete in our student contests.
A winning entry in our 2013 15-Second Vocabulary Video Contest.
We love contests, and we’re always inventing new ones. Whether writing reviews or raps, creating vocabulary videos or found poems, crafting written editorials or editorial cartoons, we hope there’s something on the list for everyone.
Here’s a calendar of what we’ll offer this year so you can plan ahead.
8. Enrich your vocabulary with our new Word of the Day + Quiz.
Our Word of the Day now includes not just a definition and an example in the context of a recent Times article, but also a related quiz that tests whether or not you really understand each word.
Other Learning Network vocabulary builders? Try the quizzes in the archive of our long-running Test Yourself series, which we’re suspending this year now that we have the Word of the Day quiz, but which test vocabulary in the context of high-interest Times articles, on topics from silent discos to Minecraft.
And, of course, for more fun with vocabulary, we have an archive of over 100 Student Crosswords as well as these 12 Ways to Learn Vocabulary With The New York Times.
9. Participate in our new, twice-monthly Film Club.
Op-Docs Trailer
Op-Docs is a forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced by independent filmmakers with wide creative latitude, covering current affairs, contemporary life and historical subjects.
By Jason Spingarn-Koff and Kathleen Lingo on Publish Date September 30, 2013.Via award-winning series like Op-Docs, The Times offers short documentaries (most under 15 minutes) that touch on issues like race and gender identity; technology and society; civil rights; criminal justice; ethics; and artistic and scientific exploration — issues that both matter to teenagers and complement classroom content.
At least two Fridays a month this school year, we’ll be posting films we think will inspire powerful conversations — and then inviting teenagers and teachers from around the world to have those conversations here, on the blog. For each, we’ll also provide optional discussion questions and short activities to take the discussions further.
10. Use our new series of weekly quizzes + writing prompts with your E.L.L. students.
Animals in the news around the globe
From snow frolicking red pandas in Ohio to garbage cart horses preparing for retirement in Mexico -- animals in the news around the globe. Gavino Garay reports.
Publish Date February 22, 2015. Photo by Reuters.Video from an earlier edition of Ideas for E.L.L.s about teaching using photos, videos and news about animals.
Every Monday this school year beginning Sept. 14, we’ll be providing a post for E.L.L. students that will invite them to learn from a Times article, video or photo via a short quiz and a related writing prompt. We hope E.L.L. students from around the world will come to the blog and post their thoughts.
11. Teach any day’s Times with our activity sheets.
Graphic organizers, games, discussion starters, maps and more: Great Ways to Teach Any Day’s Times is one-stop shopping for reusable activity sheets like Times Bingo, a Connecting The Times to Your World reading log, a Cause and Effect organizer and a fun photo activity.
We’ve also added a few new selections specifically to help students with Common Core skills like close reading, primary-source analysis, and comparing texts.
Here, meanwhile are Three Teacher-Tested Ways to Encourage Your Students to Follow Current Events This School Year and 50 Ways to Teach With Current Events in general.
12. Find collections of high-interest articles about young people.
Love and Roller Coasters
Lisa Guerrera and Rich O’Flanagan both speak the language of roller coasters, an inside joke that brings sweet memories of their romance’s earliest beginnings.
By Catherine Spangler on Publish Date June 19, 2015. Photo by Damon Winter/The New York Times.“Teenagers in The Times” is our monthly post that recognizes newsworthy young people by regularly collecting all the Times articles about them in one place.
Use the feature’s articles to inspire student projects and goals, as models for journalistic writing, as nonfiction companion pieces to literature, or simply as a way to hook young people on reading the newspaper. Here are more teaching ideas, as well as an activity sheet (PDF) you can use with any month’s collection.
13. Quickly locate Times resources for frequently taught subjects.
Our Teaching Topics page is a living index to collections we’ve made on topics we know teachers teach often — from climate change to immigration, and bullying or learning with infographics. Check back frequently: we keep adding.
We also have a growing list of pages devoted to teaching literary classics alongside Times nonfiction. Each page links to Times articles past and present that fit with the themes, characters, settings and ideas of works by authors from Shakespeare to Salinger.
If you would like to see your idea for teaching with The Times on our blog, send it in to us through our Great Ideas From Our Readers series.
Your idea can be elaborate or simple, might involve a whole school or just one child, and could employ multiple sections of the daily paper or one dog-eared article you clipped in 1973.
We’re just interested in hearing about how people are using The Times in as wide a variety of educational settings as possible.
15. Read and comment on a poem paired with a related Times article.
For years now we have been pairing accessible poems chosen by the Poetry Foundation with Times content that somehow echoes, extends or challenges the poem’s themes. Here is an index of the full collection.
We generally alternate a classic poem, like Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” with a contemporary poem, like David Wagoner’s “For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop.”
How can you use it in the classroom? Here are some ideas.
The video above was made by students in Sarah Gross and Jonathan Olsen’s ninth-grade class in the spring of 2013. The class began each day by reading The New York Times. Mr. Olsen and Ms. Gross wrote about their adventures here.
Two Tips for Finding What You Need on Our Blog
1. Always return to the right-hand column.
The right-hand column of our blog is the best place to navigate. Though we regularly change the top section, “This Week on the Learning Network,” under that you can always find permanent links to all the regular features we’ve described above. You can also find links to more information about us.
2. Use “Search This Blog.”
Typing a word or phrase into this field (“Shakespeare,” “endangered species lesson”) at the top of the right-hand column will surface every post that has ever included it in the history of the blog, including all 12 years of lesson plans we imported from the old site. Also try these search tips to find ways to narrow your quest.