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ReadWorks is a nonprofit that provides educators with thousands of free, high-quality nonfiction and fiction articles with questions and activities. ReadWorks is inviting you – all parents & guardians – to create your own free account to help your child stay on track this summer, and all year round!

ReadWorks is a free website offering resources for differentiated reading instruction, specifically comprehension. There’s a range of nonfiction texts, activities, and assessments as well as an online platform teachers can use to track student progress.

Every teacher and student can use Newsela for free. Teachers and students are able to make annotated notes on the articles and share these notes with one another. Teachers can track the progress students are making based on the common core state standards.

Access to news content on Newsela is always free. Get additional content, standards, instructional resources, and insights with our core subject products.

Both Newsela and ReadWorks offer multiple versions of texts to meet the needs of struggling readers. ReadWorks offers more accessible versions of many passages (a feature called StepReads) but not all passages. Newsela does this best by providing each article at five distinct Lexile levels.

Pricing structure: Paid, Free (Newsela News is free, but Essentials and Core Subjects subscriptions are paid; contact the developer for pricing information for schools and districts.)

Newsela changed its pricing structure starting in the 2019-2020 school year, making a mostly free service now mostly subscription-based.

Analytics has become a big part of Newsela’s business, as remote learning hurts student engagement. The startup’s paid product is between $6 to $14 per student, which contrasts with textbooks that can cost a school $20 to $40 per student “even on an annualized basis.”

The free version of Newsela does not give you access to student data but students have access to their own progress on assignments. This is a great opportunity to schedule 1:1 conferences with students and have them share their progress with you while taking ownership of their learning.

Note: Your students will need to access Newsela through all Schoology courses that they will need access to in Newsela. Students at all schools can create Newsela accounts by going to newsela.com and clicking Sign Up. Teachers can invite students to join their Newsela classes from their Classes page.

Classes imported from Google Classroom are automatically synced each time you sign into Newsela using Google. You can manually “re-sync” by going to the Students tab in your Newsela account settings.

Students create their own accounts when signing in with a username and password. Anyone can go to newsela.com and click Join to create a student account with a username and password. To do so, take the following steps: Go to newsela.com.

To view answer keys from a teacher account, follow these steps:

1. Go to an article and select the level for which you want to see the quiz answer key.
2. Click Activities to open the activities panel.
3. Click Quiz. Click Next and Back to view all quiz answers.

Click the blue “Assign” icon. This will take you to the assignment page, where you select the class (or classes) for the assignment. You’ll also see three optional steps: Adding instructions, adjusting the reading level your students will see, and removing articles. Click “Assign” or “Save Draft.”

Lexile ranges generally have overlapping grade bands, but there cannot be any overlap on Newsela, because each article level can correspond to only one grade.

• Grade 2: 300-500.
• Grade 3: 501-620.
• Grade 4: 621-780.
• Grade 5: 781-920.
• Grade 6: 921-1010.
• Grade 7: 1011-1109.
• Grade 8: 1110-1180.
• Grade 9-10: 1181-1260.

The staffers at Newsela rewrite each news article so that it can be read at five (5) different reading levels, from elementary school reading levels as low as grade 3 to maximum reading levels in grade 12.

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Student Reading Level

Newsela’s Search Filter Options Teachers can search for content suitable for their classes, based on an article’s Text Levels and the grade bands for which it is most appropriate.

Students can annotate at newsela.com, when using a computer or netbook, or on the Newsela mobile app. To annotate a piece of text on a laptop or netbook: Click and drag your curser over the text you’d like to annotate. Click “save” to save the annotation, and share it with your teacher.

Level Control

1. On an article or Text Set, click Create Assignment.
2. Under Text Level, click Adjust Level.
3. Select a reading level.
4. Click Assign Now to assign the article(s) to your students at the selected level.