How the Scholastic Know The News Answer Key Actually Works
The Scholastic Know The News Answer Key is a teacher resource used alongside the "Know the News" reading comprehension program for elementary and middle school students. It provides correct answers for the weekly news-based quiz sets that accompany each issue of the program. Without it, teachers would need to grade everything themselves, which eats into planning time. Here is how I actually use it in practice. I pull the PDF from the Scholastic teacher portal using the school district code I was given during onboarding. The file is organized by month and week. Each week has two reading passages — one for grades K-2 and one for grades 3-5 — each with five to seven multiple choice or short answer questions. The answer key lists the correct responses clearly at the back. I used to spend about 45 minutes per week manually checking those quizzes. With the answer key in hand, I can grade a class of twenty-five students in roughly eight minutes. That is not a dramatic difference, but over a nine-month school year it saves me around thirty hours of work. I would rather spend that time on lesson prep.
One thing the program does not warn you about: the answer key PDF sometimes has misaligned page numbers if your school is running an older version of the material. In my second year using this, I pulled a key that listed Week 14 answers under the Week 15 heading because the layout shifted slightly between updates. I caught it when a student pointed out that question four on their quiz did not match the key. The workaround was simple — I cross-referenced the question text itself rather than relying on the week labels, and confirmed the correct answer by checking the student workbook table of contents. The content is consistent even when the formatting drifts. The format of the answer key is straightforward. It is a single PDF, usually between 2 and 5 megabytes, downloadable from scholastic.com/teachers after you log in with an educator account. You do not need a separate subscription beyond what your school already pays for the print or digital editions of Know the News. The keys are updated at the start of each month. If you are behind on distribution, you can usually retrieve the previous month's key, but the current month's is the one you will use most often. A few details that matter. The grades K-2 version uses picture-based response options for younger readers, and the answer key reflects those selections with letter codes rather than full written responses. If you are teaching the lower grades, make sure you are downloading the correct level. Mixing up the K-2 and 3-5 keys is the most common error I see, and it takes about ten seconds to correct once you know what to look for. The file names on the portal include a grade band abbreviation — look for "K2" or "35" in the filename to tell them apart.
Another thing to keep in mind: the short answer sections do not always have a single correct phrasing. The answer key gives a model response or acceptable variations. I usually show my students the key response on the board and then accept anything that captures the same idea. This saves time on arguments about wording and keeps the focus on comprehension rather than spelling. There are limitations. The program only covers the news topics Scholastic has chosen to feature in a given month. If your school is working through a current events unit that diverges from the monthly theme, the answer key becomes less useful. In those cases, I build my own supplemental quizzes using primary source material from the same topic area. It takes more effort upfront, but it aligns better with what the students actually need to engage with. Also, the digital version of the program includes auto-graded assignments through the Scholastic classroom dashboard, which pulls from the same answer bank. If your school has that enabled, you may not need to download the PDF at all. The auto-grade feature handles the bulk of the checking, though I still pull the key occasionally to verify a couple of the automated responses when a student's score seems off.
Get the Full Details
If you are a teacher new to this, start by downloading the current month's key and doing a single graded set before the week launches. That way you know exactly where the file lives and how the formatting appears in your browser. The first time you try to find it mid-week while twenty kids are waiting for their papers back, you will appreciate the heads up.
