Came across this website today called News in Levels.  The developers of the site have come up with, what I think as, a brilliant idea and an educational idea that I haven't seen yet.  What they do is take news articles and then re-write them in two other levels.  In other words if you are just learning English like an ELL student is, then you would read the articles at a Level One, (pretty much everything is in present tense, not sure if I like that idea).  Level two steps up the readability of the news Article and level three is the complete article.

Also for each difficulty there is a section called "Difficult Words" in which you will see a word classified as difficult with an accompanying definition or synonym.

Finally below each level is a sound or video file of the article being read or the actual news article seen through video.  Just click on the media file to have it read to you.







Below is a sample of a first paragraph of each reading level.  You can compare them to see if this site is something you might want to try with your students.


Level 1:













Level 2:














Level 3: