Margin Notes

If you’re looking for current and engaging lessons and texts to bring into your classroom, there is a new resource worth checking out. This fall, the Learning Network introduced a series of 15-minute lesson plans built around timely topics, texts, images, questions, and ideas. A new lesson is published each school day, with topics rotating across ELA, social studies, STEM, and the arts and media. Each one can work as stand-alone learning opportunity, but can easily lead to more opportunities for conversation, reading, writing, or inquiry.

For example, the  Taylor and Travis Sentence Scramble, asks students to attempt to put a set of sentences in the order they appeared in an article, opening up authentic conversations about text structure, specifically cohesion, sequencing, and how writers guide readers through ideas.

The lesson can stop there, or, if students are interested and you have the time, there is a natural pathway into more reading, discussion, and critical thinking. Each of the bite-size lessons also includes an “If you’d like to go further” option. In the Taylor and Travis Sentence Scramble, students can move from thinking about how a paragraph is constructed to a bigger question about journalism: why would The New York Times devote around two dozen reporters and editors to covering a celebrity wedding? Students can read a related Times Insider piece and consider whether that investment of newsroom resources was justified.

The flexibility of these 15-minute lessons means they can be used in the way that makes the most sense for your students and the learning that is already happening in the classroom. And, with a new lesson added every day, this is a collection worth bookmarking and coming back to when you are looking for new texts and learning opportunities.