In any given week, Kelly Payton’s fifth grade students might read newspaper articles about immigration or Syrian refugees or climate change. Sometimes she assigns them the same stories, other times they’re instructed to go online and like the rest of the news-consuming world, click on the headlines that most appeal to them.
By consuming current stories about the concerns and plights of others, Payton, a teacher at a public school in Union City, Calif., has noticed her students developing more empathy.
That was the goal of “A Mile in Our Shoes,” a new program from the news curating start-up, Newsela, which takes content from a variety of credible news sources like the Associated Press, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and rewrites the articles at five reading levels to make reading news accessible to all ages.
In the last month, Newsela unveiled its new experience categorizing stories by different communities. Students could choose (or be assigned) to read a collection of stories, for example, about African Americans or the LGBT community or rural Americans.
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