If you are teaching English as a foreign language abroad like me, then you are always looking for ways to get our students engaged with authentic English. So for today’s blog, I sourced five great news and current affairs for kids websites that you can trust. You can pass these websites on to your students’ parents too if they ever ask for extra homework.
The content on these websites is classroom-friendly, the topics are ideal for younger learners and the language can be graded. Plus, best of all, they contain unbiased, regularly updated and well-researched content. But, we will look over the pros and cons of each website and at the end of the blog we’ll find out which website is my clear winner for the academic year ahead.
My evaluation criteria will include:
- Filtering by grade or Lexile level
- The quality of the images
- Whether or not there is an accompanying video
- If the text can be read aloud for our students to listen to
- How up-to-date and engaging the website is
Website 1: The Smithsonian Tween Tribune
The Smithsonian Tween Tribune is a mouthful! But, at the top of this website, we can filter current events for kids by grades – K-4 (kindergarten), 5-6, 7-8 and 9-12. Plus, if you look at the bottom right, we also have the Lexile levels and that’s my preferred filter option.
Starting with the most basic option, we can see all of the articles and topics that are contained within that Lexile level. So, if we look at this article in more detail, we can see that we have a nice picture to start with. But, the text is quite long for a kindergarten to grade four level to read.
If we select Video underneath Topics on the right-hand side of the screen, we get a full list of the articles that contain videos. In this particular article, we are looking at ‘How do you mummify a body?’ If we scroll down to the end of the text, we are presented with this video.
Conclusion: The Tween Tribune has some good images, the videos are great and it is kept up to date. But, it does lack in the range of grades and Lexile levels. Kindergarten to grade four for example is lacking and there’s no option for the text to be read aloud. We will see later that this is available on other websites.
If you do teach kids, then go check out my 10 tips that will help both beginner and experienced teachers.
Website 2: National Geographic For Kids
The next news websites for Young Learners that we’re going to look at is National Geographic for Kids. This website does not provide current affairs or events for kids. But the articles on these websites are perfect for young learners. You can tell just by looking at the website that it’s perfect for children – there are articles, games, videos, a focus on animals and a lot of other areas plus great photos. We can also use the search function to find particular topics that we are covering in class at the time.
The images in these articles are of fantastic quality, as you would expect from National Geographic. The only issue is that you cannot grade the language for your students. So while every article is directed toward younger students, we cannot filter by grade. The majority of the articles on this website have accompanying videos to the text often with more than just the one. I regularly incorporate animals into my lessons with my younger learners, so frequently look at the vast amount of animal resources on here.
Conclusion: The biggest strength of National Geographic is the variety of topics and great photos, plus the video and games content for young learners. The issue here is simply that we cannot filter by grade or Lexile level. The content also does not appear to be updated regularly and there is no option for reading the text out loud.
Website 3: Time For Kids
I am sure that you will have heard of Time Magazine, but what about Time For Kids? As soon as we are on the website, we can grade our articles from kindergarten to grade one, grade two, grades three to four and five to six. We can look at the articles by each grade and the topics include financial, literacy content and so forth.
The pictures are high quality and if we keep scrolling down we can see an option for Read Aloud in English and Spanish (‘En Espanol’). This option will read the whole text to us and that’s perfect for students, particularly if they’re at home doing this by themselves. I also like that the text is separated by images, so it isn’t too dense for the students to read.
Conclusion: We can grade the language, read it aloud and the images are of high quality. The only issue is that there isn’t any video content that appears to be available currently.
Website 4: Dogo News
The fourth website that we’re going to look at is Dogo News. If we go to the top left, we can see that there are a lot of options to search within the website by category, grade level, word count and interest level. So on the face of it, this looks great.
However, when I choose grade level one, for example, I did find the articles to be quite complex. I am trying to use this with students who are learning English as a foreign language and these do not appear to be appropriate, unfortunately.
When we click on an article, we can see that we do have an option to listen to it, but when we select this we discover that it is a pro feature. In other words, we need to subscribe to listen to it.
When we go back to the menu we can find a video category option. But, a lot of these articles do not have embedded videos. I am struggling to find any videos at all.
Conclusion: With Dogo News, it appears on the face of things to be a great website, but when you look a little deeper there isn’t much there of merit in the free content for teaching purposes. As teachers, we are all already on very low salaries, so I generally prefer to avoid subscriptions where possible.
Website 5: Scholastics Kids Press
Our fifth and final news website for Young Learners that we are going to check out is the Scholastics Kids Press. With this website, the first thing that I love is that there is a selection of articles that are written by the kids themselves. If we select, the Kids Reporters link from the top of the website menu, we can see that the content is being kept well up to date.
So, there is a lot of great content here and they are pushing out a lot of articles. However, there is no option to grade the language and there is no option to read aloud. There are some videos available and the young reporters video the interviews, which will help our younger learners engage. Not all of the articles have videos, but it is good to see that it does come up as an option.
Conclusion: It is great to see a website that has children as the authors and this could inspire our students. However, from a practical perspective, there is no option to select by grade and the text cannot be read aloud.
And The Winner Is…!
Now, it’s time for the big conclusion. Which website am I going to use this year? Cue the drumroll! And the winner is… Time For Kids!
With Time For Kids, I love that you can grade from kindergarten to grade one, grade two, grade three and so on. The images are of great quality, the texts and content are very accessible for Teaching English as a Foreign Language students and I like that you can read the text aloud.
Do you agree with my choice for my best news websites for Young Learners? Do you have any other websites that you can recommend? Go ahead and share your thoughts in the comments below, remember to subscribe and remember to share with your colleagues. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time!