Any elementary or English teacher can tell you that English Language Arts is typically broken down into four strands: Reading, Writing, Language, and Speaking & Listening.  Most educators focus the majority of their explicit instruction on the Reading, Writing, and Language strands, while embedding the Speaking & Listening strand throughout the day.  Because of this, Speaking & Listening is often not explicitly taught.  In addition, many teachers assume students have the skills needed to demonstrate mastery of Speaking & Listening standards.  Unfortunately, this is often not accurate and students usually struggle with listening the most.

Thankfully, there are multiple Ed Tech options that can help educators explicitly teach listening skills to their students.  Three of these options are ReadWorks, Listenwise, and Adobe Spark.

Science News for Students is a free online STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) news article site with NGSS topics for students in 6th-12th grade that are published daily. The website describes the writing level as, "both shorter news stories and longer features, all written with a vocabulary and sentence structure aimed at readers 9 to 14 years old."  It is the kid-friendly version of Science News.  Not only does it provide in-class reading material to supplement units in math, science, and language arts, it also has a list of Power Words within each article.