How can giant pandas and hurricane names be engaging for grade school students? XTRA Weekly—powered by Exploros—uses articles like these from Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers to create interactive ELA curriculum that students love. Our article and activities on the Exploros platform give each student a voice. Learn more in our video about Lesson 1 of the 2024-25 school year.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
As many educators know, nonfiction literature is underrepresented in K12 instruction. We think we have the answer. I’m Drew Schlosberg, the founder and CEO of XTRA Weekly, and we’re partnering with Exploros. It’s an organization that is focused on social instructional platform that assists teachers by staging powerful learning experiences in face-to-face or remote device-enabled classroom.
What we do, we use articles highly-motivated, highly-interested articles from Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers throughout the country. And, we do this on a periodic basis where we focus on those critical reading skills and the writing skills where every student will have a voice and every student is engaged in the learning. We have the opportunity and the ability to put the lessons, the articles, and the student responses in 200 different languages so no student is left on the sidelines.
We’re very excited about this interactive approach and we have launched lesson one of the 2024-25 school year couple days ago. It’s focusing on articles that dealing with giant pandas at a zoo in California and also how we name our hurricanes. The article on the giant pandas came from the the Los Angeles Times. When we do these articles, we also infuse some great reading activities with it. This one will be focused on students finding adequacy of data, that reading aspect; they do a research report; they also do some extension activities creating a poster; and they do information reports, so that one get a lot of play with the giant pandas.
The other one as I mentioned before is how we came to name hurricanes. Why are they named, how did that start, what is the history behind it? And that came from also the Los Angeles Times ironically. And, we really focus on drawing conclusions and making inferences. There’s some narrative writing activities with us. And we actually ask the students to do things like interview questions, take a look at who’s being featured in the article, and they can become the journalist in this area.
So we hope you enjoy it. It is the first lesson of many we’ll have in the 2024-25 school year. We encourage you to go to XTRAWeekly.com/GetStarted to get started for a free teacher trial and you’ll see many of the articles from last year’s lessons as well did about 36 of those. We hope you enjoy it.