Newsela App Review

For one of my graduate classes, I was given the assignment to review some apps. This was a fun assignment and helpful to our family. I have needed a good way to teach current events to my kids. We have tried using different websites for kids with news stories, but mostly they were boring or hard to find relevant topics. The adult sites were just a little too much.

The history curriculum I am using made a great argument for why teaching current events was so important. So once again this year, I endeavored to find a way. We live in a foreign country, so getting a newspaper isn’t even an option. When I taught in public school ages ago, we had a little Scholastic paper that came every week that we read as a class. Those were so fun, but again, not an option for me in this season of life.

I started looking for apps that could really benefit my kids and be easy for them to use and not something I would have to filter all the time. I need things that are less about me figuring it all out and more about the kids taking charge of their learning and enjoying it.

We tried several apps and were not really happy with any of them. Most of them would only work for a month and then start charging you a lot of money per month to have access. The kids really could have cared less about current events. They are pretty compliant and happy to check off their list that they read something, so we managed to kind of keep up with current events.

Then we found Newsela! We love this app! This has totally changed all of our outlooks. The kids are all engaged now. They are required to look up a current event, read it, and give me an oral summary of the article three times a week! However, they love to look at this app every day and read the articles. If they are using it during our school day, I often have to ask them to stop reading articles and come work on another subject. At lunch or dinner we have been known to have lively conversations about an article they read that day. They are now able to add intelligent insight and facts. They don’t even realize they are learning. 

Screen shot of Newsela App

The articles have opened up all sorts of new avenues of interest for them. They look forward to this part of their day! It is really easy for them to use. The home page has a large picture for each article and it’s headline. They can scroll through and find an article that interests them or they can use a filter to decide if they want to only look at sports or politics or several other options. They can use two fingers to swipe up or down to change the reading level of each article. You can also change most of the articles to Spanish.

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The boys love reading the app together

Seriously, this is an incredible app. We have had trouble with the quizzes at the end of each article. We haven’t tried very hard to fix this problem, because I don’t see a need for them to take a quiz. They are already enjoying it and applying it to their lives. They have completely taken charge of this part of their school day. I am really proud of them and excited to be having such real conversations with them. We live in Iraq and so their worldview is already pretty expanded, but this is exponentially increasing it.

Here's a video of the boys.