Favorite Info Text Ideas from "Ripped From the Headlines" @NCTE

We just attended a great session presented by Katherine Schulten (@kschulten) from the New York Times Learning Network and New Jersey high school teacher Sarah Mulhern Gross (@thereadingzone) at NCTE.

Favorite ideas:

• Use short bursts of informational text in connection with literary texts
• "Times Topics" pages to find news, commentary, and archival articles on particular people, events, issues, etc. (example: Times Topics: Malala Yousafzai).
• New "Text to Text" lesson plan format pairing informational texts from the NYT with commonly taught literary texts
• Weekly "Poetry Pairings" connecting classic and contemporary poems with an informational text from the NYT
• "What's Going on in This Picture?" -- students practice using evidence to support conclusions drawn about a visual text
• 15-second vocabulary videos made by students to demonstrate definitions of words in creative and often funny ways
• Have students plug vocabulary words into nytimes.com search box to see multiple uses of the words in a variety of informational texts

The bottom line: Use these resources to enhance your teaching of literature by integrating informational texts into your existing units. The Common Core does not mean giving up great literature!

Looking forward to presenting reading strategies for engaging students in informational texts in dialogue with literary texts. The first step is finding great pairings, like those featured above. The second step is to easing your students into negotiating these sometimes daunting and unfamiliar texts. Join us Saturday at NCTE at 1:15 in the Hynes Convention Center in Room 301 (I.38).