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National Reading Month—also sometimes called March Into Reading, because it happens during that month—is a time to encourage students of all ages to read and promote it as both a fun and educational activity.
Newsela ELA and Newsela Writing are great partners to instill a love of and curiosity about reading in your students. Take a look at some of the resources you can use this March—and all school year—to build skills, introduce students to new genres, and practice writing across subjects.
[Get students reading across subjects and genres](id-genres)
Whether you have a classroom full of book lovers or a group of reluctant readers, National Reading Month is a great time to show students how exciting different genres can be. Use these resources to introduce students to a variety of content, like:
Novels and nonfiction books
Reading can be even more enjoyable for students when they understand the background, context, and themes of a novel or nonfiction book. Newsela ELA’s Novel and Book Studies Collection makes this possible by pairing articles, videos, and other background resources with some of the most popular or top student-interest novels and books for each grade band, like:
Classroom-ready lessons from Poets.org help develop students’ poetry, reflection, and analysis skills. Use them to deepen their understanding of the elements of poetry, and to enhance their speaking and listening skills through discussions about the topics and themes. Choose from interesting selections like:
A favorite question from students (in any subject) is often, “Why does this matter?” Our ELA in the Real World collection gives students the context they need to understand how ELA affects life beyond the classroom. Each text set features a timely, current events article and scaffolded resources to help students draw connections on topics like:
Tying instruction to holidays, seasons, and other key moments throughout the year can help pique students’ interest in the topic and get them excited about reading and learning. Our ELA Holidays and Seasonal Moments collection has everything you need to incorporate timely content into your classroom lessons. Check out selections for the upcoming months:
February: Bring texts on Black History Month, the Super Bowl, and Presidents’ Day into your ELA classroom.
March: Spark students’ interest with activities for Read Across America Day, Women’s History Month, and March Madness.
April: Spice up your lessons with content for National Poetry Month, Earth Day, and various religious or cultural spring holidays.
[Build skills and meet standards at every grade level](id-skills)
Beyond getting students to enjoy reading, National Reading Month is a time to help them build skills through reading that they can use as they progress through school and in life beyond the classroom. Use these resources to help your students build a variety of literacy skills:
Standards and skills practice
The Newsela ELA Standards and Skills collection is the perfect resource to help you check the current state of students’ literacy skills and provide targeted instruction to help them grow. This collection offers:
Reading skills checks: Texts and formative assessments that allow teachers with students in grades 2-12 evaluate their current reading level and literacy skills.
Elementary and secondary nonfiction texts: Texts for each grade band designed to build skills like finding the main idea, breaking down arguments and claims, and synthesizing informational texts.
Elementary and secondary fiction and poetry texts: Texts for each grade band designed to build skills like identifying the theme, analyzing multimedia, and comparing and contrasting literary texts.
Research projects
Targeted resource projects can provide contexts and current connections to help jumpstart students’ investigations and exploration. Curated projects for each grade band are age-appropriate and cover topics that interest your students, like:
Help students learn about analyzing all sides of an issue with our Pro/Con opinion articles. These texts are rated for both reliability and bias by Ad Fontes Media, an independent news rating organization. Students can explore thought-provoking issues like:
Should college athletes be compensated?
Should cancel culture exist?
Is affirmative action at colleges and universities really fair?
Debate prompts
After learning how to analyze an issue, students can use those skills to help them articulate and argue their point of view on the topic in a debate. Try these debate topics for each grade band:
Students can learn more than just literacy skills through reading. They can also learn how the world works, how people interact with each other, and even more about their own feelings and experiences. Our ELA Social Skills collection helps students dive into these less technical skills, using resources like:
Paired text activities help students learn how to analyze ideas, themes, and events across two texts from the same or different genres. Choose from options for each grade band in genre pairings like:
Adding writing practice to your lessons—especially lessons outside of ELA—can be a challenge. With ready-to-implement lessons and projects for different text types, you can easily weave writing practice into your daily classroom lessons. Choose from:
Mentor texts: Browse and share a variety of high-quality writing examples for argumentative, opinion and persuasive, personal, informative and explanatory, and literary analysis writing.
Informative and explanatory writing: Find lessons and projects like how-to pieces, personal profiles, and inquiry-driven informational writing.
Narrative and creative writing: Let students express their creative sides with projects like haikus, humor writing, and daily prompt challenges.
[Use vetted, trusted resources for every lesson](id-resources)
To make your National Reading Month content and lessons as easy to incorporate into daily instruction as possible, you need vetted, standards-aligned, easy-to-use resources. Newsela ELA has a variety of them to make implementation as easy as possible:
Curriculum Complements
Curriculum Complements make your existing materials even more relevant, engaging, and accessible by pairing them with aligned content. Find content that pairs directly with curriculum solutions like:
Amplify
HMH Collections
McGraw Hill
… and many more!
Teacher-Created Content
Who knows better what students love and what’s easy and valuable to teach in the classroom than other teachers? Our teacher-created text sets cover a variety of topics and include standards alignment, learning objectives, compelling questions, and student instructions for easy implementation. Explore engaging lessons like:
Building literacy skills doesn’t have to come from reading alone. Differentiate your lessons and appeal to students’ accessibility needs by sharing ELA videos on a variety of topics like:
Skills and concepts: Cover reading skills and story elements, writing how-tos, and grammar practice.
Background knowledge: Teach students about authors, modern issues, and scientific concepts.
Poetry: Discover what qualifies as a poem, how to do poetry analysis, and the different types of poetry that exist.
Drama: Break down dramatic devices, key figures and places in drama, and Shakespeare’s take on the genre.
Want access to these and other great resources in your classroom?
Use Newsela’s knowledge and skill-building products to create timely, engaging lessons for every holiday, event, and subject. If you’re not a Newsela customer yet, sign up for Newsela Lite and get a 45-day free trial of all our premium and differentiated content and activities to help you plan more exciting activities for National Reading Month and beyond!
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