Learning Network: New free resources for a new school year

September 8, 2026

Good morning! Welcome to a new school year of free resources for teaching with The New York Times. — The Learning Network

How to Use The Learning Network

Six headings with illustrations of students next to them: Writing Prompts, Student Contests, Quizzes and Vocabulary, Photos and Graphs, Lessons and Teaching Ideas, Ask a Journalist.

If you’re new to The Learning Network, or if you want to discover new ways to use our site, check out our updated How to Use The Learning Network. Now that our school year has officially begun, all of our resources are ramping up. Here are the features that are now publishing daily:

Bite-size lesson plans: New this year are our 15-minute lesson ideas. This morning we published ways to bring the 25th anniversary of 9/11 into your classroom.
Writing prompts: How was your summer? — that was this morning’s question to start off the new school year. In the next week we’ll be asking students about the dangers of football, the squishy toy craze, and writing in the age of A.I.
On This Day: Also new this year, we’re spotlighting historic events from the front pages of The New York Times. Sept. 8 is our first day. Bellringer? Game? Research project? We have ideas for bringing these primary sources into your classroom.
Vocabulary: Learn a new word with Word of the Day; we provide definitions, parts of speech and pronunciations, plus examples of how words are used in context in The Times.

Next week our weekly features begin, including What’s Going On in This Picture?; What’s Going On in This Graph?; News Quiz for Students; Film Club; and Current Events Conversation. Plus, on Sept. 16, our first contest of the new school year — Tiny Memoirs — opens for submissions.

We’re excited to share all of these free resources with you. Here’s to a strong start to the new school year!

We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to LNfeedback@nytimes.com. More next week.

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