B olster Y our C hild ’ s L iteracy W ith N ewsela
Hands-Off Learning for Busy Parents
If you are looking for easy-to-implement strategies to improve your child’s literacy at home, check out Newsela. Newsela is a content platform that partners with sources like The Washington Post, Smithsonian. com, and The Economist to provide content that is relevant to the moment on a broad variety of topics. Unlike a newspaper or magazine article, though, the content on Newsela is aligned with Common Core educational standards, meaning that time spent practicing skills with Newsela’s learning exercises will help your child start the next school year ahead. Articles come with questions and multiple-choice answers already written, and kids can choose from over 20 different genres, including current events, sports, and even science.
adjustable, so your child can practice reading texts that push them without being frustrating or too difficult. Newsela includes a functionality that allows parents or teachers to manually set a Lexile level — a text difficulty level the reflects your child’s reading ability — but if left unadjusted, Newsela will gather data about how your child performs on assessments to automatically set texts to the appropriate difficulty. Newsela collects data on how your child performs on the standards identified in each assessment, so spending some time looking at that data can help you understand their strengths and weaknesses and fill in any gaps in their learning. Whether you adjust text difficulty or Newsela does, learning about your child’s Lexile can be an excellent way to better understand your child’s strengths and weaknesses, which is essential if you are going to help bolster their literacy.
The platform publishes 10 new articles every day, and the level of reading and assessment difficulty is
S potlight on S helia M anely Offer ing Support , Encouragement , and Understanding
In 2003, The Manely Firm had three employees: Michael Manely, Shelia Manely, and a secretary. Since then, Michael and Shelia have worked side by side for over 15 years, aiming to provide the best services throughout Georgia. Shelia, who has always been interested in law, finds her work tremendously fulfilling. However, it did take her a while to find her true calling in family law. Shelia received her undergraduate degree in paralegal studies, but as she prepared to pursue a career in law and enter law school, a bad experience brought her up short. “I went to work as an intern in one of the largest firms in Kentucky. The culture there was so caustic that it caused me to return to school and get my master’s in public administration to pursue a different career path. Had I interned at a firm similar to The Manely Firm, I would have gone onto law school,” she reflects. In fact, Shelia didn’t return to the law field until she married Michael, 17 years ago. “It was shortly after we had our son. At the time, I was traveling the country, and Michael was working at the firm. We quickly realized that someone needed to raise the baby,” she laughs. “I couldn’t be traveling around the country just as Michael
couldn’t constantly be in court. So, I made the decision to leave my career and join Michael at the firm as his business manager.” Shelia continues, “It was a combination of the desire Michael and I both had to put our shoulders to the same harness and pull in the same direction — to have more control over our personal lives so we could be a stronger family. I also saw that Michael serves his clients the way I would like to see clients served. The confidence I had in him as an attorney, plus his work ethic and philosophy of serving family, made me comfortable to make the decision to join him at the firm.” Family law works all over the world, and that’s something that Shelia feels most connected to. “Our firm is a family- focused firm, and the culture we maintain intentionally is very supportive and collaborative. And it’s part of my duty to make it so,” Shelia adds. “As a blended family ourselves, we understand what it means to go through divorce and come together as a family. We lived that process, and together with our own experience and the lessons we learned in our own lives, we deliver that understanding and compassion in our services to our clients.”
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www.al l fami lylaw.com
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