10 New Stories Added to The News Minute! 🗞️✨

Hello Cool English Teachers! 👋

Welcome back to the weekly blog. This week, we have a massive update to one of our most popular activities: The News Minute. We have just added 10 brand-new stories to keep your students engaged, reading, and listening!

If you haven't tried The News Minute yet, it is a truly complete, multi-level English lesson built around a single current news story. It is well-thought-out, easy to use, and packed with interactive features that teachers and students absolutely love.

You can check out all the new stories here: Play The News Minute 🎧

🌟 Why We Love It

The best part about The News Minute is its flexibility. Every single story is available in three different levels:

• A1-A2 Beginner

• B1-B2 Intermediate

• C1-C2 Advanced

  
  

It is the exact same news story, just adapted for different abilities. You can easily flip between the levels at any time with the click of a button at the top of the screen!

🛠️ How to Use It in Your Classroom

Here is a quick breakdown of the activities included with every story and how you can use them with your students:

• Audio Read-Along: Each text comes with a high-quality audio recording and a synchronized word highlighter. Teacher Tip: Play the audio in class on the big screen and have your students follow along with the highlighted text to practice pacing and pronunciation.

• Gap Fill & Vocabulary: After reading, students can test their listening or reading skills by filling in the missing words in the Gap Fill activity. The missing words are pulled directly from the Vocabulary section, which provides key terms with simple, easy-to-understand definitions.

• The Teleprompter: This feature is amazing! The text scrolls on the screen just like a real news broadcast. You can set the speed to slow, normal, or fast. Teacher Tip: Assign this as homework! Ask your students to play the teleprompter, read along like a news journalist, and record their reading on their phones to send to you. 🎙️

• Comprehension Quizzes: Every level includes a quick multiple-choice quiz to check that your students understood the facts of the story.

• Discussion Questions: Wrap up the lesson by switching to the discuss tab to spark some fun and engaging conversation about the news topic.

  
  

⚙️ Extra Teacher Tools

To make your life even easier, we included a few extra tools on the dashboard:

• Downloadable PDFs: Prefer to work on paper? You can download and print the lesson instantly. 🖨️

• Customizable View: Use the full-screen button to remove distractions, and use the text slider (T) to make the reading font bigger or smaller depending on your screen size.

The News Minute is the perfect activity to start together in class, and then assign the rest of the sections as homework with our cool 14 day HW links.

We hope your students love these 10 new stories as much as ours do! Have a great week of teaching, and stay cool! 😎