newsela

newsela is a very nice resource of electronic news articles designed with education in mind, another e-resource to have in your toolkit along with EPIC! Books and ReadWorks. The site offers quite a lot to educators for free, and a "pro" tier is available. You can access it through a web browser or free app for iPad.

News articles serve a number of purposes in speech and language interventions:
-context for use of graphic organizers teaching narrative or expository language structures
-opportunity to pose questions and elicit discussion with use of discussion webs (see Hoggan and Strong's mention of discussion webs as a narrative teaching strategy)
-newsela is geared around "text sets" and themes as well as daily news, and also allows you to change the reading level of each article
-within each article is scaled vocabulary known as "Power Words"- these are presented with student-friendly definitions that align with Isabel Beck et al's recommendations for building robust vocabulary.
-presenting this material digitally will add a level of engagement; newsela integrates nicely with Google Classroom.