The website indicates DOGO Media is a “network empowering kids to engage with digitial media in a fun, safe, and social environment. It states DOGO translates to young or small in Swahili, but there is nothing small about this free website. (Note all information in this review is about their FREE resources. Check the website for information about paid subscriptions with additional features).

DOGOnews.com is an alternative with several other current event online resources )see previous reviews). New material is added daily. Articles are appropriate for ELA, Science, and Social Studies. The website lists articles for K-12.

There are many choices in their thousands of articles. They are searchable by bands of grade levels. I found the topics to be engaging and relevant to the audience.

After selecting an article, there are multiple enhancements. The first icon will read the passage. Yes, the voice is a little robotic, but it will allow students who might not be able to read the article themselves access to the content. The entire paragraph is highlighted in yellow with a moving purple box highlighting the text that is being red. Students can control where the audio begins to read by placing the cursor in their desired location. Not happy with the way it sounds? There are multiple voices which can be accessed by selecting a name. Accents vary and some are less robotic than others.

Some selections have video. The ones I have watched are well done and definitely engaging for the students. This is a huge plus for a free program.

At the conclusion of the article there is an automatic citation creator which will cite the article using MLA, APA, or Chicago formats. A great addition for research!

A list of vocabulary words appears at the end of the citation creator. This is useful for teachers. While the PLAY GAME button creates a word search, this may be entertaining but likely has little real educational value unless your students are working on letter discrimination.

To access most the reading comprehension and vocabulary in context sections, you need a paid account–but there is a critical thinking question which is higher level and would make a great short-answer question often available for free.

If you use Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams or Dogo Classpage, there is a share button which makes this easy and quick!

If students sign in for a free iDOGO ID they can create a custom avatar, earn points and badges, follow other DOGO users, bookmark, share, and express opinions. I have not used these features, but if they are as well done as the rest of the site, they might be worth checking out. Subscribing to their newsletter allows you to receive DOGO news weekly highlights.

Check out DojoNews

Check out the Resources from Reading Specialty

There are many resources at Reading Specialty which relate to each day of the school year and provide a passage written at three grade levels (Passage 1, grades 9-10; Passage 2, grade 8; Passage 3, grades 6-7. ).
Passages have been evaluated using a minimum of 5 different readability formulas

Click HERE to download a FREE CALENDAR table listing each date in April and an event in history. Below you will find a list of the topics in April. Each month contains different events.

White House Easter Egg Roll

Pony Express

Maya Angelou

Helen Keller

Sacajawea

Suez Canal

Arbor Day

Apollo 13

Jonas Salk

Thomas Jefferson

Cold War

Bay of Pigs

Paul Revere

Boston Marathon

Columbine

William Shakespeare

Sigmund Freud

DNA, Watson and Crick

Chernobyl

Tiananmen Square

Operation Mincemeat

 Each passage contains these types of questions:

• main idea
• vocabulary
• organizational patterns
• inference
• summarizing

One subject for the class with differentiated passages allows the teacher to discuss, develop background knowledge, show a video clip or engage the full class yet provide for individual differences. 

Students and teachers using multiple passages can assess student progress. Diagnostic charting shows teachers and students patterns of errors with main idea, vocabulary, organizational patterns, inference, and summarization. Compiling data is easy and motivating with student completed charts.

Included in the lesson:

➢ A nonfiction passage written at three different grade levels

➢ Questions over the passage for each level.

➢ An answer key

➢ A chart to monitor progress and collect data in the five assessed areas (main idea, vocabulary, organizational patterns, inference, and summarizing)