Teaching and Learning with Newspapers

​All of us continue to look for ways to increase reading and writing in our 1:1 classrooms — specifically, the use of non-fiction, informational texts. To that end, we thought you’d be interested to learn that many newspapers offer free educational subscriptions.

Through the generous sponsorship of Newspapers in Education (NIE), many newspapers offer free access to teachers and students so that they can bring real world applications to the subject they teach! Locally, you can get the Daily Herald or the Chicago Tribune. Some newspapers offer their own programs: New York Times - The Learning Network, USA Today and The Washington Post. To find out if your favorite newspaper offers free access, simply search free education access with the newspaper’s name.

Along with free access, newspapers offer a variety of resources for teachers to foster critical thinking and to enhance vocabulary, reading comprehension and writing skills across the curriculum, such as articles and questions, writing prompts, quizzes and crosswords, multimedia, contests and lesson plans by subject area.

In case you aren’t aware, newspaper content is also available through our databases. Kellie and I believe this feature is a hidden gem when working with classes. Instead of searching a newspaper for daily information, you can search multiple newspapers over time. There are two ways you can search for this information. For example:

​A basic search for bullying articles in our Student Resources in Context database yields results by content type.  As you can see, there are 6,504 results!  

When you find the number of search results to be high, as in this case, you can do an advanced search to decrease the results. Let’s say we wanted to find recent articles from the New York Times that were published since 2017.  In the example below, we searched for bullying by Document Title, New York Times as Publication Type, and a publication date after January 1, 2017 at a high school reading level. This search yields a manageable 10 results! ​

As you continue to create and/or modify research projects for your class, Kellie or I are available to help with your database searching or by creating a libguide!