Ralph Ortiz's Blog: How to Empower Students With Timely Knowledge Using “The Week”

The Week is a valuable current events resource with timely information that helps students build their knowledge of current events. As I’ve reviewed The Week, I believe this is a valuable resource for teachers to use because the week surveys a variety of news sources that students can access and read. Each week comes with a lesson guide to help you plan and select appropriate topics of conversation.

This blog post is sponsored by The Week. All opinions are my own.

As we work to integrate nonfiction texts into student reading, it is helpful to use reliable online tools for this purpose. Additionally, we need to build information literacy by exposing students to a variety of news sources. In my opinion, The Week does this very well.

If you haven’t heard of the week, it is structured like a “Presidential Briefing.” Instead of reporters going to “cover” events, they instead survey and read through many sources of news and summarize the most important into a simple-to-read 42-page document. Instead of one point of view, the news articles include multiple points of view so students can compare and evaluate sources and discuss a variety of opinions. If you want to look deeper into The Week, get the facts in the free Teachers’ Reference Guide.

Unique Features That Make Current Events Relevant

Several features of The Week that I think are particularly useful for building information literacy include:

The Main Three News Stories of the Week – The three stories getting the most coverage and a variety of articles to read on the topic along with a summary.
The controversy of the week – The top issue is shared along with multiple viewpoints.
How they see us – Commentary on how the international news organizations view US news.
Pick of the week’s cartoons – Open up a conversation on current events in a novel way from the best cartoons across a variety of news sources.
learn about other features…

How Do I Subscribe to The Week?

The Week subscription for schools comes to your classroom in both print and digital at $1.09 per copy (this is 78% off the single copy price.)

You can order several weeks or more of this valuable current events resource.

The Week includes multiple perspectives on today’s news articles from a variety of news sources.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored blog post.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”