Some teachers might think that The New York Times, with its sophisticated language and lengthy articles, is too adult or advanced a resource for many middle school students. But teachers who have used The Learning Network tell us that the array of activities we’ve created using Times content — including photos, illustrations, graphs and videos — gives students at different reading levels a chance to deepen their thinking and expand their knowledge of the world.
If you are a middle school teacher curious about how The Times can be used to develop writing skills, practice data literacy, promote student voice and, of course, help students learn about current events, below is a brief introduction to some of our most middle-school-friendly resources. And because we know that the “classroom” will look different for everyone this year, we’ve included a list of practical strategies for how to use each of these features in a variety of settings, whether that’s in-person, virtual or a hybrid.
If you want to learn more about The Learning Network and everything we offer teachers and students, we suggest you read our “How to Use This Site” guide and subscribe to our free weekly newsletter.
Here's what you'll find below:
Writing Prompts
Credit...Marion FayollePicture Prompts
Each week we publish four new short, accessible, image-driven prompts that invite students to create short stories, poems and memoirs; share experiences from their lives; analyze illustrations, graphs and charts; and debate current issues.
Here are examples of the four types of writing we promote using our prompts:
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Birds and Cages (Analyze an Illustration)
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Family Cooks (Share an Experience)
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Spy Cams (Take a Stance on an Issue)
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Trapped Inside (Write a Story, Poem or Memoir)
If you want access to hundreds of prompts, here’s our growing collection. And if you want a list of prompts categorized by writing type, here are 144 prompts from this past school year.
Want to learn more? Watch our on-demand webinar that walks you through how to use our Picture Prompts.
Student Opinion Questions
For students able to tackle more text, we use an excerpt from a Times article or an Op-Ed as a jumping off point for each of our daily Student Opinion questions. These questions explore popular subjects — including family, school, friendships, race, gender and social media — as well as current events like the coronavirus pandemic or the Black Lives Matter protests. We generally write these questions with students ages 13 and older in mind, so please use your best judgment as to whether the topic and reading level are appropriate for your class.
Here are three questions that show the variety of topics we invite students to engage with:
We have published thousands of these prompts over the past decade. To find the latest, visit our collection. Or for lists of prompts organized by writing type, try these 130 prompts for argument writing or these 550 narrative writing prompts.
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What’s Going On in This Picture … and Graph?
What’s Going On in This Picture?
Each week, we select an intriguing Times photograph from any point in the paper’s 169-year history and strip it of its caption. We ask students to look closely, interpret what they see in the image, and explain what details support their analysis with these three questions:
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What is going on in this picture?
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What do you see that makes you say that?
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What more can you find?
What’s Going On in This Picture? works as a learning activity with students of all ages, from elementary school to adult learners. Teachers have shared how they use the activity to practice visual literacy skills; to ease students into writing paragraphs with claims and evidence; and to support English language learners.
Here are three additional images from our collection that might puzzle middle school students:
To help you get started using this feature, we have a webinar all about What’s Going On in This Picture?
What’s Going On in This Graph?
Each week, we host another related feature, What’s Going On in This Graph?, that asks students to notice and wonder about a Times graph, chart or map. We partner with the American Statistical Association to select graphs and moderate an online weekly discussion. Every week we ask:
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What do you notice?
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What do you wonder?
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What’s going on in this graph? Write a catchy headline that captures the graph’s main idea.
Here are three examples of graphs to engage middle school students:
To learn more about how to use this feature, here’s a webinar.
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Daily Lesson Plans
Every school day we choose an important or interesting Times article to feature in our Lesson of the Day and pair it with a warm-up, critical-thinking questions and a going-further activity. The activities and questions are intended to help students understand the article, contextualize it within current and historical world events, and connect the content to their own lives.
As you might expect, many of our Lessons of the Day respond to major news events, such as the 2020 election and the death of Kobe Bryant. However, many more are about events and issues small and large that we think will interest students and connect to the curriculum.
Here are examples that showcase three ways that teachers use our daily lessons:
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Katharine, the Great White Shark Who Ghosted Her Trackers, Resurfaces (Explore Content Further)
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The Secret History of ‘Easter Eggs’ (Practice and Develop Skills)
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‘Sesame Street’ Is Opening Up to Syrian Refugees (Bring the World to Your Students)
And, as with our other features, we offer an on-demand webinar showing how to use this resource.
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Contests
Tens of thousands of students from around the world participate in our contests each year, creating podcasts, writing editorials, telling stories, documenting their lives and responding to the news.
Teachers tell us they appreciate how these contests invite students to compose for an “authentic audience” and motivate them to produce their best work. Students tell us they like the variety of ways they can express themselves — and the confidence boost when their writing and art are recognized. For us, these contests offer more formal opportunities to do what we try to do every day: Show students that their voices and ideas matter.
For the 2020-21 school year, we invite middle school teachers and students to participate in the following contests:
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Narrative Writing
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Review
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15-Second Vocabulary Video
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STEM Writing
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Editorial
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Podcast
Students who are ages 13 or older can participate in additional contests as well; see our 2020-21 contest calendar for more details.
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:
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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.
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Discuss and debate. Our writing prompts feature questions to inspire debate, too. Use these to practice accountable talk and civil conversations.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
Practice close reading.
What’s Going On in This Picture? and What’s Going On in This Graph? can prepare students to make inferences and cite evidence in other subject areas.
You can even apply the prompts when breaking down a difficult text or concept. For example, in language arts class, when close reading a dense passage or a poem, you can invite students to lead their own inquiry by asking: What is going on in this text? What do you see, or read, that makes you say that? What more can you find?
Our Lessons of the Day also feature questions that encourage critical thinking and media literacy skills.
Use our writing curriculum to support contests.
To guide students in the creation of their submissions for our contests, consider using our writing curriculum, which includes units to support the narrative, review, STEM, editorial and podcast challenges. Each unit has writing prompts, mentor texts and lesson plans that help students learn and practice the essential elements of each genre.
You can adapt this curriculum to build a writer’s workshop or, if you’re teaching remotely, a “blended writer’s workshop,” which combines both synchronous and asynchronous learning activities to guide students through the writing process. Here is an excellent model for how to do this from the educational blog Moving Writers.
One way you might try adapting this curriculum for online learning is by incorporating our writing prompts into a writer’s notebook, or a digital writer’s notebook (Moving Writers). The responses can serve as starting points or inspiration for students’ contest submissions.
You can also use our Mentor Text series to teach specific skills that will elevate students’ final pieces. Try this “flipped” version suggested by Moving Writers: Record mini lessons for students to watch and practice for homework. Then, use your live class sessions for further practice or to conference with students about their pieces. When students are at the revision stage, they can meet in small groups or breakout rooms to give feedback on one another’s pieces.
Join a global conversation.
If your students are 13 or older, they can comment directly on our site. Invite them to post their responses to writing prompts in the comments section and reply to other students from across the country and around the world. They will need to register for an account to be able to comment; this article explains how.
They can also join the live moderated conversations for What’s Going On in This Picture? from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern on Mondays and What’s Going On in This Graph? 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Wednesdays. If your students are under 13, you can try the activity as a class first, summarize their conclusions, then post a comment on their behalf.
Go beyond the feature.
Many of these activities might just be starting points for deeper discussions, writing or research. Here are a few ideas for how to take them further:
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Research. Use a Lesson of the Day as a jumping off point for research or a deeper dive into the subject. After reading the article, students can create a list of questions that they want to explore further.
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Turn writing responses into full essays. Student responses to writing prompts can be fodder for longer narrative, argumentative, analytical or creative pieces — like those they might submit to our contests.
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Tell a story. Many teachers have encouraged students to write a creative piece inspired by images from our Picture Prompts and What’s Going On in This Picture? series. Here’s a lesson plan that guides students through producing a short story with Times images.
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Make connections. Invite students to make connections between a lesson, writing prompt, image or graph and their own lives, the world, a concept they’re learning about or a text they’re reading. In this lesson plan, a teacher tells us how he encourages students to make connections between Times images and their independent reading books.
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