To learn more about how to use this resource, here’s a webinar.
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Tips for Using These Features in the Classroom
Whether you’re teaching in person or online, synchronously or asynchronously, you can use these strategies to build our features into your classroom routines and support students of all levels.
What other ideas do you have for teaching with these activities in your class? Share them in the comments.
Get students discussing.
Our Writing Prompts, What’s Going On in This Picture? and What’s Going On in This Graph? activities make great discussion starters for students of all ages and levels. Here’s how:
Build community. Get to know your students and help them get to know one another by using our writing prompts as icebreaker questions, like: What would your dream home look like? What have you learned about yourself during quarantine? What do the objects in your home say about you?
Our What’s Going On in This Picture? and What’s Going On in This Graph? activities can also serve to build a positive classroom culture by fostering communication, collaboration and fun on a weekly basis.
Discuss and debate. Our writing prompts feature questions to inspire debate, too. Use these to practice accountable talk and civil conversations.
Chat in person or through video. During an in-person or live virtual session, you can post the prompt or image on a slide, then put students into (socially distanced) small groups or breakout rooms to discuss. Bring them back together and invite them to share what their partner or group said with the whole class.
Have conversations online. If you’re teaching remotely, you can post a question or image on your learning management system or a virtual bulletin board, like Padlet, and invite students to respond and reply to one another there in writing. For more fun, try posting it on Flipgrid and asking students to answer via video.
Establish routines.
Teachers have told us that our regular features can provide a structure to their week that gives students something to look forward to and creates predictability in a chaotic time. Here are a few ways to try this in your classroom:
Begin class with a writing prompt. Whether you’re in-person or online you can use our prompts to build a daily writing habit or get students talking to one another.
Do What’s Going On in This Picture? or What’s Going On in This Graph? every week. You can lead a live session one day a week by projecting the image or graph on your screen and inviting students to discuss it verbally or using the chat if you are online. Watch this video of a fifth-grade teacher conducting the Visual Thinking Strategies protocol in her classroom.
For asynchronous learning, post the image on your learning management system and invite students to comment all week. Be sure to check back for the reveal on Thursdays.
Start “Current Events Fridays” (or any other day of the week). Dig through our archive of Lessons of the Day to find high-interest, student-friendly articles to read and discuss. Or, invite a different student each week to present an article of their choice to the class. All of the Times articles on The Learning Network are free.
Make Times articles accessible.
Though we try to choose the most student-friendly articles for these features, Times texts can be challenging for younger students and struggling readers. Here are some suggestions for scaffolding their use for your class:
Use images to activate schema. Use Picture Prompts, What’s Going On in This Picture? or the art included in our Lesson of the Day as a warm-up to activate prior knowledge, vocabulary or connections before reading the related article. Invite students to discuss the given prompts or try some of these: What do you think is going on in this image? What do you think the article is about if this is the image that illustrates it? What people, places, ideas or words might you associate with this image? What personal connections can you make to what you see?
Try our warm-ups. Our Lessons of the Day and Student Opinion questions come with warm-ups that can help students build background knowledge and make connections to the content before reading. These usually involve discussion or reflection questions, watching a video, or viewing images and graphs. You might do them as a class or in small groups.
Do a read-aloud: After completing the warm-up for our Lesson of the Day or Student Opinion questions, instead of letting students read the article on their own, read it aloud to them, encouraging them to follow along. You can do this during a live class session or record a video of yourself reading and post it on your learning management system for students to watch as they work through a lesson.
Chunk the text. Our Lesson of the Day and Student Opinion questions come with comprehension and discussion questions. Instead of having students read the entire article, then answer the questions, you might have them read only a few paragraphs at a time, then respond to the corresponding question before moving on to the next few paragraphs.
Support English language learners.
Our Picture Prompts and What’s Going On in This Picture? features are popular among students who are learning and developing English. They can use these images to practice vocabulary, brainstorm verbs and adjectives, or learn new words.
To further support English language learners, you might label the images with key words and encourage students to use them to build full sentences.
These make great writing or speaking and listening activities, depending on your students’ goals.
Give students choice.
Each of these activities provides plenty of opportunity for student voice and choice in the curriculum.
For example, some teachers invite students to scroll through our list of writing prompts each week and respond to one of their choosing. You might have them post their responses on your preferred learning management system or share what they learned with the class via a live presentation or virtual bulletin board, like Padlet. You can try this with any of our features.
And if your students are fairly independent writers, as a bonus assignment, you can challenge them to enter at least one Learning Network contest of their choice throughout the school year.
