Text book adoption was exhausting. Between sifting through the core curriculum, the supplementary materials, and the intervention program options, if I don’t see curriculum for a few months, I’ll be happy.

As I was putting together information for my department, one external company (who partners with one of the text book companies) caught my attention. Listen Current partners with NPR to create lessons around current events. These lessons hit listening comprehension teaching standards, presenting articles related or connected to English Language Arts, science and history.

I used a science lesson today on sea slugs. Usually I’m bad about integrating non-fiction into our reading explorations, but this one paired nicely with our reading of The Gardener by S. A. Bodeen. While much of the language was advanced for the students in my class, through pausing and having conversation about the report, students were very successful making connections between the article and some of the ecological themes in the book.

Also, because I’m also a doctoral student, I clicked on the research tab for Listen Current. While this section isn’t super robust, it did pique my interested about listening and listening comprehension and how listening comprehension relates to reading comprehension. This is something that I don’t remember talking about for the entire time I’ve matriculated at the university.

If you’ve used Listen Current, I’d love to hear how that works in your classroom. 

For links to the Evernote files of my collected resources, click here.