Hot Off The Press: The Newsela Daily Deck

Newsela and Pear Deck are teaming up to create Daily Decks designed to spark student engagement! Each one features an adaptive news article with interactive prompts to get EVERY student learning. These free, ready-to-teach Decks will help you explore news topics with your class while working on literacy, critical thinking skills, and building classroom community!

Teachers know that the articles they find on Newsela are relevant to their lessons and units, help students develop reading and literacy skills, and are loaded with instructional support. Students know that the articles they read on Newsela are fun and interesting, while keeping them informed and engaged with the world around them.

Each article has been curated by Newsela’s expert team and paired with proven instructional strategies to help your students go deeper with the lessons and prompt classroom conversations. With new articles published every day, there’s never a limit to how much you can explore!

What’s in a Newsela Daily Deck?

The Newsela Daily Decks combine Newsela’s curated news articles with Pear Deck’s unique student engagement platform activities to promote reading comprehension and discussion. The decks are organized into a simple sequence of activities, with prompts based on the Notice and Note Signposts developed by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst.

These nonfiction “signposts” — critical-thinking prompts — help students identify techniques that authors use to encourage deeper comprehension of the text. Look for prompts in the Daily Decks that highlight Contrasts and Contradictions, Extreme or Absolute Language, Numbers and Stats, Quoted Words, and Word Gaps. With each student responding through Pear Deck, you’ll be able to use their responses to highlight interesting answers and dig deeper into differing perspectives as a class.

These free Decks have been designed to take 10-15 minutes of time. You can do these as a class or put the Deck in Pear Deck’s Student Paced Mode to allow students to read and reflect at their own speed. Feel free to edit the slides or prompts to match your current curriculum!

How to use the templates 

To begin, select a Daily Deck topic that would appeal to your students. Note that you and your students will need to create a free Newsela account to set text levels and use the annotation features.

Step 1. Login to Newsela and assign the article to your class.

Step 2. Open the Daily Deck and launch your Pear Deck Session.

Step 3. Students will read and annotate the article, reflect and discuss.

This simple instructional pattern makes it easy to practice literacy while building critical thinking skills and global awareness.

Get the Daily Deck here or subscribe to have the Deck sent directly to your inbox!

Illustration by Kate Moore

This week's blog post was written by Pear Deck VP of Marketing, Kate Beihl.