Are you a teacher with students who have limited access to wifi or laptops? Are you running out of ideas to keep your kids engaged in high quality, fun learning? The Listenwise News Bites podcast combines NPR news stories selected for young listeners with instructional activities. Listen on wifi, or download for an easy, offline way to engage young learners with fun news, weird news, and some serious news.

Find this new podcast on Apple Podcasts today! For more age appropriate and engaging news lessons go to: www.listenwise.com

This episode features 3rd grade teacher David Green ([email protected]) and his students from North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, Illinois, just north of Chicago. David has been creating audio with his students for 15 years, long before it was called podcasting! For this service learning project, David and his students visited the Lakeview Food Pantry in Chicago to explore the problem of hunger. Listen to hear David’s expert tips for a successful podcasting project, with commentary from host and former public radio reporter, Monica Brady-Myerov. You can listen to their full episode here.

In this podcast, 5th graders from Jordan/Jackson Elementary School in Mansfield, MA explore the different lives of their classmates by conducting interviews with each other and with their teachers. They cover topics ranging from what food they eat for breakfast, to their favorite classes, to the best part of coming back home from school. Teacher Rayna Freedman had her students work in groups and asked them to pick 15 words from their vocabulary program, and that led to a lot of creativity. You can also listen to the students full episodes here.

In this episode, we hear from students at Crow Agency Public School, located on the Crow Reservation in Montana. Fifth grade teacher Connie Michael was inspired to make this podcast with her students after working with teachers at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, where she learned that students across the country had significant misconceptions about life on a reservation. Connie wanted to give her students the opportunity to debunk these myths and stereotypes, and she welcomed the opportunity of the the NPR Student Podcast Challenge to share their personal experiences and make their voices heard. Listen to their full podcast here.

In this episode of the Student Podcast PODCAST, you’ll hear from the 2019 NPR Podcast Challenge middle school winners from Bronx Prep Middle School! Teacher Shehtaz Huq helped a group of 8th grade girls create “Sssh! Periods,” in which they explored the taboo topic of menstruation. Listen to hear how they went about creating their first-ever podcast and ended up winning the NPR competition, beating out 5700 entries submitted from 25,000 students. Their podcast emulates an NPR-style reported story, and includes the voices of seven student podcasters: Kathaleen, Raizel, Litzy, Caroline, Ashley, Jasmin, and Kassy. Their podcast weaves in personal anecdotes with statistics on period poverty, period shame, and the pink tax. Listen to their full podcast here.

This episode comes from the classroom of 5th and 6th grade teacher Kate Fischer from the Hyde Park School in Cincinnati, Ohio. Looking to get into podcasting for the first time with her students, Kate she offered an extra no-credit assignment for students to create their own podcast. One student, Anna Kunkel, took on the challenge, and used her podcast to explore ‘Bias in the Media’, a challenge she has personally faced in her own research projects. Listen to hear clips from Anna’s podcast, with reflections from her teacher on the project, and tips & tricks from our host, Monica Brady-Myerov. Anna’s full podcast is also available here.

In this episode we go deep into the meaning of words and hear from ELA teacher Mary Beth Steven’s students as they dig into the etymology of vocabulary terms such as ‘kerfuffle’ and ‘hippopotamus’. Mary Beth tried podcasting with her students for the first time last year, using a Zoom brand audio recorder, and editing in Audacity. Her sixty-six students were split into groups of 4-5, created a total of 15 podcasts for their classroom series ‘One Word at a Time’. You can listen to the full series here. In this episode of the Student Podcast PODCAST, you will hear clips from the series, with reflections from Mary Beth on her experience creating this podcast series with her students.

In this episode we hear a podcast from the 8th grade class of Amy Fry, ELA teacher at Highlands Middle school in the Ft. Thomas Independent School District in Kentucky. Amy Fry’s class created podcasts discussing works they read and watched on the subject of the Holocaust, such as “Refugee,” by Alan Gratz. The theme of this project was ‘Finding Light in the Darkness’ of the Holocaust. Listen to hear from student Adam Pawlak, who earned an honorable mention for his submission to the NPR Student Podcast Challenge, and was also featured on Democracy and Me. You can also listen to his full episode here: https://www.democracyandme.org/honorable-mentions-from-npr-student-podcast-challenge/

This episode features ‘Lead GCISD Students’, a student-run podcast from the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District in Fort Worth, Texas. Students from any one of the district’s campuses can submit their podcast on a topic of their choice. Kerissa Bearce, formerly an Instructional Coach for the district, screened the episodes and added an intro and outro. In this episode we hear 3 student clips, one about fandom, one about homework, and finally one about the Constitution. You can listen to the students’ full episodes here: https://www.spreaker.com/show/lead-gcisd-students

This episode highlights the first podcast project done by Matt Stokes, an 8th-Grade Math/Algebra 1 at the International School of Brooklyn. His class podcast features NPR Style Reporting about fun Math concepts, mores specifically digging into simplifying radicals, multiplying radicals, and converting radicals into exponents. We love that they named it ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Matt’s students Rico Brill and Elliot Thomas-Gregory created this podcast using iMovie technology with other open source apps.