Thursday, September 19, 2013

Ten Great Activities: Teaching While using the Newspaper

Ten terrific classroom activities that use the newspaper to teach a lot of valuable skills -- including reading and writing for meaning, map reading, media literacy, sequencing, word meaning, and math.

"The newspaper is one of traditionally used in the media [to be a teaching instrument within the classroom], the direct results of a national campaign by publishers, generally known as Newspapers in Education (NIE).

Before the creation of NIE, newspapers were rather used only by lyceum social studies teachers in two-week units or Friday current events sessions. Now, however, newspapers are used through the entire academic year atlanta divorce attorneys portion of the curriculum."

Those would be the word of Nola Kortner Aiex, author employing Newspapers as Effective Teaching Tools. Indeed, the news might be more a component of the college curriculum than it has ever been -- for most reasons. Ten from the reasons teachers find newspapers such effective classroom teaching tools are detailed from the NIE feature "Factors for using Newspapers?" which points out that newspapers

1. are a adult medium that students of most ability levels might be proud to appear reading.
2. deal in what's happening moment, providing motivation with and discussion.
3. make learning fun.
4. can be extremely flexible and adaptable to everyone curriculum areas and grade levels.
5. bridge the gap between your classroom along with the "real" world.
6. build good reading habits that can keep going for a lifetime.
7. can be cut, marked, clipped, pasted, filed, and recycled.
8. give everyone something to read -- news, sports, weather, editorials, and comics.
9. are a cost-efficient way to educate.
10. contain practical vocabulary plus the best models of clear, concise writing.

TEN GREAT ACTIVITIES FOR USING THE NEWSPAPER

Read and write for meaning. Take away the headlines from your amount of news stories. Display the headline-less stories on a classroom bbs. Provide students using the headlines, and enquire the crooks to match each to at least one on the stories. As students replace the missing headlines, you can keep them explain the word what inside headlines that helped them find the proper story. Then distribute headlines from less prominent stories and enquire students to decide on one and write a news article to select it. If the stories are completed, provide each student using the story that originally accompanied the headline. Ask: How close was your story for the original? How effectively did the headline convey the meaning on the story? You may follow up this activity by asking students to write a headline for their favorite cock-and-bull story.

Read a map. Arrange students into groups, and assign each group one international story from the news. Have students explore Maps on the planet and pick a map associated with their assigned story. Ask students to work with the map to reply to some or all of these questions:

1. In what city did the tale happen?
2. What country is the fact city in?
3. Will be capital of this country?
4. What language is spoken there?
5. What continent may be the country section of?
6. What countries or bodies of water border the continent about the north, south, east, and west?
7. What physical characteristics of the united states might have contributed to the events from the story?
8. What effect might the presentation or number of events wear the physical characteristics of the nation?

Understand the media. Distribute advertisements cut from newspapers, and ask students to give out the merchandise in order, good appeal of the ads. Build a chart showing how students rated each product. Then distribute a directory of the subsequent propaganda techniques:

1. Bandwagon -- the implication that "all the others is performing it."
2. Plain folks -- the implication that "users in this product are like you."
3. Card stacking -- distorting or omitting facts.
4. Name-calling -- stereotyping people or ideas.
5. Glittering generalities -- using "good" labels, for instance patriotic, beautiful, exciting, which might be unsupported by facts.
6. Testimonial -- an endorsement by the famous person.
7. Snob appeal -- the implication that only the richest, smartest, or most important folks are doing it.
8. Transference -- the association of a respected person having a product or idea.

Discuss each ad, and determine the propaganda technique(s) used. Ask: Which techniques were more effective? That have been least effective? What factors, like gender, geographic location, or age, may have influenced the potency of each technique? To be a follow-up to the activity, you could possibly ask students to develop their own ads using among the propaganda techniques studied.

Arrange in sequence. Slice some popular comic strips, provide each student with one complete strip, and enquire students to put the comics in the correct order. Or arrange students into groups, provide each group with several cut-up strips from the same comic, and ask these phones separate the panels into strips and arrange the strips inside the correct order. Then introduce older students to your combination of stories an ongoing news event, and ask these phones arrange the stories within the order by which they appeared. Encourage them to utilize stories to produce a news time line.

Expand your vocabulary. Assign each student a letter from the alphabet. Ask students to browse through the newspaper, find five unfamiliar words you start with the assigned letter, and search the concise explaination each. Then have each student create and illustrate a dictionary page containing the 5 words and their meanings. Combine all pages and posts in a classroom dictionary. In the variation with this activity, you would possibly ask students to seem within the newspaper for any of the following:

> words that has a particular suffix or prefix
> words containing a specific vowel sound or consonant blend
> compound words
> words in past times, present, and future tenses
> possessives
> plurals
Older students might search for degrees of similes, metaphors, irony, hyperbole, and satire.

Explore geography. Ask each student to look the newspaper for stories that illustrate all the five themes of geography -- location, place, human interaction along with the environment, movement and communication, and regions. Display the stories over a classroom bbs labeled with the five geography themes.

Seek out classified math. Ask students to work with classified pages in the newspaper to accomplish these:
> calculate the normal cost of a 1985 Cadillac
> find what fraction of the newspaper is composed of classified ads
> figure out the price of running a 30-word ad for just one week
> estimate the entire variety of classified ads (based on ads per column and columns per page)
> compare bank rates of interest and determine by far the most and least interest $100 would earn available as one year in the area
> find what percentage of job openings start with T. As a follow-around this activity, ask each student to
produce a free ad and exchange it having a classmate. Ask: Was each of the information you need included? Or even, what was missing?

Sort and classify. Label all seven shoe boxes with one of this newspaper categories: News, Editorials, Features, Humor, Advertising, Sports, and Entertainment. Ask students to take out the newspaper stories they read each day and each one inside the appropriately labeled shoe box. At the conclusion each week, have students skim as many on the stories as is possible and write an adjective describing each on index cards attached to each box. You might suggest adjectives including factual, sad, inspiring, opinionated, misleading, silly, serious, and biased. Discuss and compare the adjectives. What conclusions can students reach about each category dependant on those words?

Play a present events game. Create a list of five categories that will be constructed with the newspaper, such as Countries, Weather Events, Mathematical Symbols, Movies, and Technology Terms. Ask students to search the newspaper for information linked to each category and also to write an issue depending on the information they find. (Remind students to create a note on the answers to their questions.) Arrange students into teams, and employ the question-and-answer combinations to play a Jeopardy type of current events game.

Make papier-mâché. Finally, when you have done anything else you can imagine with your newspaper, don't dispose of it. Make papier- mâché! Here's how:
1. Make a paste by mixing together 1/2 cup of flour and a pair of glasses of cold water. Add the paste to two cups of boiling water and return to a boil. Remove from heat and stir in 3 tablespoons of sugar. Let the mixture cool and thicken. It's also possible to create a quick no-cook paste simply by adding water to flour until it forms a soupy mix. (Since flour-based pastes get moldy over time, you should use powdered wallpaper paste when combined water for a longer-lasting creation.)
2. Tear newspaper into narrow strips, and dip the strips into the paste, coating them completely. Force out excess paste and drape the strips over a mold, for example a balloon or shaped chicken wire, overlapping the sides.
3. Apply several layers as necessary, allowing each layer to dry before donning another layer.
4. Decorate as desired.

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