National Geographic Explorer

Many of us have a magazine subscription for our classrooms, whether it be Scholastic News, National Geographic, or Time For Kids. My favorite new discovery has been all about these magazines in digital format. We receive Time For Kids for our third graders and I absolutely love it!  This year, I was able to sign up for Time For Kids in digital format as well. It's been great to be able to read TFK in digital format on our interactive white board. However, I've been looking for something my kids could use on their netbooks and TFK only gave me one log in.

Coming across National Geographic Explorer a few weeks ago has been the best thing I've seen when it comes to digital magazines!  We do not subscribe to National Geographic so we cannot get all of the digital editions in the archive. However, at any point time, they have 3-4 of their digital editions online for free! I'm hoping they don't discover this and start charging!  We've been studying nonfiction informational texts and how to make inferences, determine the main idea, and identify cause/effect relationships with these types of texts.

Not only is National Geographic Explorer accessible without a log in, but it is also interactive! As students read the articles within the magazine, they can highlight text and type on digital post-its which they can insert anywhere in the text. This serves as a great tool when they get together with their reading partner to discuss the text and the thinking they did while reading. Take a moment to check out this great digital learning tool!

National Geographic Explorer