Sunday, March 24, 2013

Online "Ezines" for Kids


I try to incorporate current events and non-fiction reading into my classroom as much as possible. I also like to share the news with my own kids too. I find that the "real" news often has too much detail (causing kids' eyes to glaze over) or too much information that  they don't quite need to know at this young age. I spent a lot of time scouring the internet to find trustworthy news sites that are kid-friendly, but not watered down or condescending. Here are the ones that I think are the best-of-the-best. You can access the site for each e-zine by clicking on its title. All descriptions are taken directly from the sites. Be sure to scroll down, there's a handful of them:


Youngzine

Join Youngzine and Sign up your class(es) for free today!
Many educators have remarked that Youngzine is a perfect complement to academic material, and can be a great resource for teachers and their classes. Learning through current events not only makes students more aware of what's going on in the world, but also helps absorb concepts better. Here's what teachers and parents are saying about Youngzine.
Moreover, Youngzine now provides a safe "blog" environment for classrooms - a constructive, creative and controlled way for teachers to create classroom assignments and foster discussions on current events!
Youngzine provides special features just for you, if you sign up as a Teacher:
  • Each of your classes gets a unique "Classroom Code" that identifies the students in that class. For each class, you get a Blog where you can post assignments and have students respond. You can include specific articles and quizzes to include in each assignment.
  • For each of your classes, you get to see a full report of each student's activities just by going to your classroom tab: their comments, assignment responses, points and quiz results.

Here There Everywhere - News for Kids

Welcome! Here There Everywhere is a news website/blog designed for elementary school-aged children. Its purpose is to show kids how they are connected to their world and introduce them to the people and events shaping it.  It credits children with being interested in and being able to understand some of the more newsy topics (though there will be lots of the fun stuff, too!). HTE can be read with a caregiver or without.


Our Little Earth




Delivered by email every two weeks
It's free





Why Files: The Science Behind the News


Our Mission
The mission of The Why Files is to explore the science, math and technology behind the news of the day, and to present those topics in a clear, accessible and accurate manner. We are based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but The Why Files covers science at all institutions that engage in scientific exploration and discovery. We hope our work will help explain the relationship between science and daily life.
Our Content
The Why Files produces a new story each week, alternating longer features with shorter shorties. We also post a series of interactive science animations, the ever-popular “Cool Science Images,” a series of Teacher Activity Pages linked to the national science teaching standards, The Weather Guys, and Curiosities. Eager to explain the science behind the news, our home page reprises older stories that become relevant to the headlines.
Our History
The Why Files was founded in 1996 as part of the National Institute for Science Education, with funding from the National Science Foundation. We have published weekly on the web since January, 1996. Since 1998, we have been supported through the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.



Tween Tribune


Welcome to TeenTribune, TweenTribune,TTEspañol and TTJunior – the daily news sites for kids, tweens and teens – where you'll find the most compelling, relevant and interesing news for 55 million kids in K-12 and their 3.5 million teachers.
Stories are selected by professional journalists working closely with teens, tweens and teachers. Teens and tweens can post comments, with all comments moderated by their teachers before they are published
We allow teens and tweens to produce 99 percent of our content as a means of engaging them. Almost 100,000 teachers and 1 million students have registered so far.
We're encouraging kids, teens and tweens to seek out news on a daily basis because our democracy depends upon a well-informed public, so we believe it is important to foster a daily news-reading habit as soon as kids begin to read.


Washington Post: Kids Post

Kids version of the well-known newspaper.


Science News for Kids   

(This site is incredibly teacher/student friendly. It allows you to customize your printout by changing font size and even eliminating any text that you may not want to include.)


Science News for Kids (SNK) is an award-winning online publication dedicated to children 9-14, their parents, and their teachers. It was launched in 2003 by the nonprofit organization Society for Science & the Public (SSP) as a youth edition and companion to SSP’s Science News magazine.
SNK offers timely, interesting news stories and features, accompanied by suggestions for hands-on activities, books, articles, and web resources. It attracts nearly four million visitors annually. Younger and older visitors enjoy its pages.
SNK news stories are selected from articles from SSP’s award-winning flagship magazine, Science News, which enjoys paid print circulation of over 120,000 paid subscribers and millions of readers each year. Science News is written by a staff of professional science journalists and editors, and covers all areas of science. SNK content is tailored to make Science News accessible and interesting for the middle-school audience. Longer news features are commissioned from professional science writers as original articles for the site.



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