Products
Products OverviewNewsela products are purpose-built to unlock student motivation, inspire teachers, and drive long-lasting learning outcomes.
Resources
About
Products OverviewNewsela products are purpose-built to unlock student motivation, inspire teachers, and drive long-lasting learning outcomes.
The World Series gives your students a timely reason to read, discuss, calculate, and investigate. These baseball activities help you connect the excitement of the season to skills across ELA, social studies, science, and math.
Use these selections to choose texts, get lesson ideas, or find videos and simulations that fit your grade band and goals. Some activities build background knowledge about baseball and its cultural role, while others use the sport to make abstract concepts more concrete.
Use baseball texts to help students move from game-day excitement into reading, discussion, and writing. They can build background knowledge, study an author’s craft, and see the larger social impact of sports on culture.
Baseball texts give you flexible starting points to kick off World Series activities in your ELA classroom. Students can read about players, baseball history, fandom, and fiction connected to the game. Use the full collection when you want students to choose their own text, or narrow the options by reading level, Spanish availability, or the topic students are most ready to discuss.
Jackie Robinson’s story helps students see baseball as part of American history. In this text set, they can use resources to read about Robinson’s life, connect sports history to civil rights, and compare related stories about participation, representation, and barriers in baseball.
Students can use the poem “Casey at the Bat” and the fiction story “Wild Pitch” to study how authors create tone in sports writing. The activity asks students to notice specific words and phrases, annotate what those choices make them think or feel, and then apply the same techniques in their own writing.
Use this paired reading activity to help students analyze tone in sports writing, then practice creating a specific tone in their own fiction or poetry.
Grades 6–8 · ELA · Two to three 50-minute lessons
Ask students to choose five words that describe what it feels like to attend a sporting event, such as a baseball game, basketball game, or track meet.
Read “Casey at the Bat” with the class, then have students read Wild Pitch independently. As they read, students highlight words and phrases that help them picture the scene or create a specific feeling, then annotate what those choices made them think, feel, or picture.
Have students answer: “What tools do authors use to capture the spirit of sports?” Then ask them to write their own fiction or poetry about a sporting event or another event they enjoy, naming the tone or mood they want to create and using figurative language, dialogue, and word choice to build that feeling.
Students can answer the discussion question through a class discussion or a written reflection before they begin their own writing.
Sports stories can help students look beyond the final score and ask what a game means to the people involved or to those watching. This text set includes resources about baseball and other sports, focusing on how they can bring people together, make people feel included or heard, and offer hope during difficult times.
A longer baseball book can give students a shared anchor text, while shorter supplemental texts help build background knowledge before, during, or after reading. Explore a fiction and nonfiction selection to best target your students’ interests and the skills you want them to practice.
In social studies, you can connect the World Series to American culture, leadership, teamwork, and the game's evolution over time. Students can trace how the championship has grown, why certain baseball moments stick in public memory, and what the game can reveal about leadership, records, and the communities around a team.
Newsela Social Studies activity
Use this shorter sequence to help students connect World Series history to American culture, community, leadership, fairness, and teamwork.
Start with what students know
Have students discuss what they know about the World Series and why baseball has been called “America’s pastime.”
Read for history and culture
Assign World Series was a big hit from the beginning and one or two related resources from the table.
Build the timeline and reflect
Add key moments to a class timeline, then have students write one paragraph about what the World Series can teach beyond the scoreboard.
Baseball gives students a concrete way to study force, motion, energy, and math concepts. These activities move from the physics of pitching and hitting to math activities with baseball data, Generation Genius videos, and PhET simulations you can use to extend the lesson.
Pitching and hitting make force and motion visible. Students can track what happens to a baseball as the pitcher releases it, as it travels toward the plate, and after the batter gets a hit. This activity uses a predict-observe-explain structure so students can start with their own thinking, read about the physics, then revise their explanation with evidence from the resources.
Newsela STEM resources
Use the anchor article to introduce the pitch-to-hit physics activity, then choose an additional reading if students need another example of force, motion, performance, or data in baseball.
Activity at a glance
Students predict which forces act on a baseball from pitch to hit, read In baseball, from pitch to hit, it’s all about physics, highlight physics principles and evidence about how scientists study the game, then revise their explanation using the predict, observe, explain worksheet.
| Resource | Use it for | Reading Level | Spanish? |
|---|---|---|---|
| In baseball, from pitch to hit, it’s all about physics | Anchor reading for the predict-observe-explain activity about forces and energy from pitch to hit. | 470L–940L | |
| Time Machine (1920): Science explains Babe Ruth’s home runs | Extension reading for students who want another example of science explaining baseball performance. | 610L–1400L | |
| Baseball or calculus? Advanced metrics changing way we interpret game | Data connection for students ready to move from physics into statistics and baseball analysis. | 610L–1200L | |
| Forces on a baseball | Focused support for naming and explaining the forces acting on a baseball in motion. | 600L–1100L | ✓ Yes |
Scroll left to right to see the full table.
MLB’s Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System gives students a timely way to see how ratios and percentages influence a real decision. They can read about how the new system works, look for numbers indicating potential benefits or drawbacks, and then compare challenge results across teams.
Newton’s third law shows up most clearly when the bat and ball meet. The bat pushes on the ball, and the ball pushes back on the bat. Students can also examine related collisions and energy changes to understand why this idea matters beyond a single swing.
Force and motion show up in nearly every part of a baseball game: A pitch, swing, fly ball, throw, slide, or catch. This activity can help students move from learning basic force vocabulary to seeing how the actual laws of motion act on a baseball.
Generation Genius science videos can help students see the many physics examples that arise during a baseball game. Help them connect gameplay to pushes and pulls, gravity, engineering, and even body systems.
Generation Genius math videos can help you turn baseball examples into work where students measure, graph, compare, and calculate. Younger students can count and graph hits and runs. Older students can use baseball data to practice unit rates, probability, or percent change.
Use the video that matches the math students already need to practice, then choose a baseball data set or classroom activity that gives them numbers to work with.
The World Series can be more than just a seasonal one-off lesson—especially if you’ve got big baseball fans in your classroom. Start with the resource or activity that best fits what you’re already teaching, then let the game give students a concrete entry point to the main skill.
Not a Newsela customer yet? Sign up to start your free 45-day trial and get access to all premium, differentiated content and activities that are part of the Newsela Learning Suite.
Explore science, ELA, and social studies activities that will get your students excited about learning while tapping into their interest in the Super Bowl.
Use basketball articles for students to teach ELA, STEM, and social studies with engaging NBA content and real-world learning.
Use Stanley Cup Finals lessons to engage students in ELA and STEM with real-world sports connections and ready-to-use classroom activities.
.png)
