Every day, something happens in the world your children should know about. A vote in Congress. A breakthrough in medicine. A conflict overseas. A record broken, a law overturned, a discovery made. Graduated News takes today's real headlines and rewrites each story into six reading-level versions, from Grade 4 through Grade 12. Same story. Written six ways.
We use six tiers, each calibrated to a specific range of grade-level reading ability. Every story on Graduated News exists in all six versions. Each version is scored to a target range on the Flesch Reading Ease scale — an open, widely accepted readability standard.
| Level | Description | FRE Range |
|---|---|---|
| Grade 4 | Short sentences, common vocabulary, basic context provided | FRE 80–90 |
| Grade 5 | Slightly expanded vocabulary; cause-and-effect reasoning introduced | FRE 70–80 |
| Grade 6 | Multi-clause sentences; broader context assumed | FRE 60–70 |
| Grades 7–8 | Complex sentences, nuanced framing | FRE 50–60 |
| Grades 9–10 | Sophisticated vocabulary, analytical framing | FRE 30–50 |
| Grades 11–12 | Near-adult prose, full contextual depth | FRE < 30 |
These are not summaries or vocabulary substitutions. Each version is rewritten for its intended reading level.
For a generation of parents, the evening news was a shared event. One television. Walter Cronkite at 6:30. Kids didn’t have a separate news — they had the news. That’s gone. Today’s parents consume more news than any generation in history, and almost none of it reaches their children. Graduated News is a small attempt to fix that.
My father was the fifth of nine children. He grew up in a household where everything had to pass a simple test: can we afford it times nine? Most things didn’t pass. That stayed with me when I started thinking about Graduated News. One family subscription covers every child in the household. Teacher accounts are free. The free tier exists and always will. We believe the ability to read and understand the news is not a premium feature. It’s a right.
Teachers use Graduated News to bring current events into the classroom without the friction of finding age-appropriate materials or simplifying articles by hand. Free teacher accounts include classroom dashboards, reading data by student, and auto-generated comprehension quizzes for every story.
Families use it to read the same story together, even when children read at different levels.
Graduated News is a product of SW Products LLC, based in Dallas, Texas. Independently built and operated, with no outside investors and no advertising.