current events assignment high school

7 FREE Current Events Websites for Students

Studying current events gives students the opportunity to make relevant real world connections, engage with high-interest topics, and practice foundational reading and writing skills. Although working with current events is extremely valuable, it is not always easy to find news outlets that provide accessible content for students. The websites listed below are FREE of charge, don’t require any type of sign-in, and contain a variety of kid-friendly and appropriate news sources for students to utilize when studying current events. 

DOGO News  

DOGO News offers standards-aligned current event articles written with kids in mind. Higher level vocabulary is printed in bold and hyperlinked to a definition. Lesson plan ideas are also offered for multiple grade level bands. 

Smithsonian Tween Tribune

The Smithsonian Tween Tribune provides students with high-interest news articles that can be adjusted according to Lexile level.  As a teacher, you have the option to share articles straight to your Google Classroom.

Teaching Kids News

Teaching Kids News has been publishing news articles for kids for over ten years. Each article includes links for further reading and ideas for connecting the article with ELA curriculum. In addition to the current event articles for students, there is also an entire category on the website dedicated to media literacy.

Science News for Students

Science News for Students is an award-winning publication dedicated to providing students with the most up-to-date news in the fields of science, health, and technology. Each article includes a glossary of terms and a readability score.  In addition to the news articles, the website offers additional learning opportunities including Word of the Week, Experiments, Cool Jobs, and more.

Student News Daily

Student News Daily has six main categories: Daily News Article, World Events, Media Bias, Editorial, Editorial Cartoon, and News Quiz. Each news article includes comprehension questions, background information and additional resources (videos, maps, etc.).

The New York Times, Lesson of the Day

The Learning Network from the New York Times features short lessons based on current event news articles.  The lessons are designed to help students better understand world events, think critically, and make text-to-self connections.

CNN 10 is a ten minute news show that appears as a daily video on CNN.com. Daily news from around the world is presented in short video segments. The goal of CNN10 is to deliver internationally significant stories that are digestible for a younger audience. The show strives to provide a neutral position on all topics by providing multiple viewpoints and general overviews.

Instantly make your current event assignments cross-curricular by aligning your worksheets with reading comprehension skills. Click here to read more about how you can rotate through five different standards-based formats when assigning current event reports. If you don’t want to recreate the wheel, you can add diversity to your current event assignments with these printable AND digital standards-aligned templates. Each current event worksheet focuses on a different reading comprehension skill including main idea & details, text connections, vocabulary in context, fact vs. opinion, and summarizing.

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Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Seven Ways to Bring Current Events Into the Classroom

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The news always seems to be moving a thousand miles an hour, with much of it impacting our students’ lives—either now or in the future.

This two-part series will explore ways we connect those current events to what we’re teaching in the classroom.

Today, Suzie Boss, Kristen Koppers, Sarah Cooper, Mike Kaechele, Jessica Torres, and Renee Hobbs share their ideas. You can listen to a 10-minute conversation I had with Suzie and Kristen on my BAM! Radio Show . You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

You might also find additional useful resources at The Best Resources & Ideas For Teaching About Current Events.

Project-Based Learning

Suzie Boss is a PBL (Project-Based Learning) advocate, author, and member of the PBLWorks National Faculty. Her latest books are Project Based Teaching and Reinventing Project-Based Learning, 3 rd Ed :

One of the best ways to amplify the authenticity of school is to connect the curriculum to current events. I call this “ripped-from-the-headlines” teaching. For many students, the invitation to focus on timely topics—from pop culture to political controversies—is a surefire way to increase engagement.

Current events can inform lesson plans in small ways. For example, English teachers can make free-writes more relevant by using hashtags from social media as writing prompts. Elementary teachers might focus morning meetings on events that are in the news—and, likely, on students’ minds. Science teachers might connect a lesson to a health-related headline.

To maximize the learning potential, however, I encourage teachers to look to the headlines as inspiration for more extended, project-based learning. Well-designed projects invite students to go deeper and make their own connections between academics and the world beyond the classroom. In the process, they will likely need to think critically about everything from the reliability and biases of news sources to the echoes of history in events unfolding today.

Let’s consider a few examples.

Chemistry teacher Ray Ahmed leveraged the Flint, Mich., water crisis to launch his students in Brooklyn, N.Y., on an investigation of how to prevent lead from leaching into drinking water. They had to think as chemists to design experiments about corrosive inhibitors, analyze data, propose solutions, and explain their results in a scientific journal article. Although they live hundreds of miles from Flint, Brooklyn students made personal connections to the larger issue of environmental racism, which has affected the quality of life in their own community. (Ahmed was one of the inspiring teachers I interviewed for a recent book, Project Based Teaching: How to Create Rigorous and Engaging Learning Experiences . This video from PBLWorks documents the Water Quality Project from start to finish.)

Immigration issues not only dominate headlines, they also reflect the life experiences of many of our students and their families. Connecting today’s immigration stories with academic content about human migration is a way to bring human geography to life. For example, Texas teacher Ryan Sprott is co-founder of a collaboration between educators and artists called the Borderland Collective , which invites students to take part in storytelling, photography, and art making.

Election cycles offer social studies teachers real-time connections to their content. Projects might culminate in debates, with students basing arguments on evidence; candidate fairs that students host, with a focus on issues they care about; or public-service campaigns to increase turnout of first-time voters.

If you overhear students buzzing about pop culture, listen closely for connections to learning goals. For Delaware English teacher Dara Laws Savage, it was the #oscarssowhite controversy a couple years back—when few actors of color were nominated for Academy Awards—that generated the idea for an annual awards event honoring African American icons. It’s become an annual event during Black History Month. Students develop criteria for excellence in different categories, make nominations, and persuade voters to share their opinions. Listen to an interview about the project here .

If you’re looking for timely connections for your next PBL unit, ask yourself:

• Is there a topic or event that could provide an entry event for your next project?
• Do you see natural connections between the topic and your upcoming content goals?
• Does the topic involve a problem or challenge that your students could attempt to solve or debate through an extended inquiry project?

As you design your next project, take advantage of resources that will help your students think critically about current events. For example, Project Look Sharp is a K-12 resource for building media literacy. Pro/Con challenges readers to consider both sides of controversial issues.

Don’t be surprised if your students wind up making headlines themselves as a result of their projects.

Connecting George Orwell & Harper Lee to current events

Kristen Koppers is a national-board-certified teacher. She earned her bachelor of arts degree in English from Western Michigan University, a master of arts in English and a master of arts in educational administration from Governors State University. She is a public high school public English teacher. Her book Differentiated Instruction in the Teaching Profession was released in July, 2019:

Connecting current events with lessons in the classroom isn’t as difficult as it seems. Practically every lesson that’s taught from kindergarten through high school, and even postsecondary, can connect to a news article worldwide. It’s difficult to get students to watch the news or even listen to it. Because what they see on social media is the extent of their knowledge. Social-media news, at least from what I can see, is not all accurate. How can we as teachers make sure students are aware of credible information to information that is missing important facts?

The problem isn’t that many don’t take the time to read, listen, or even watch current events. The problem is that it’s not researched. As an ELA secondary education teacher, I not only connect current events to almost every lesson but I make it as authentic as possible. When I teach 1984 , by George Orwell, we focus on the aspect of the First Amendment. Even as an English teacher, I bring in the other subjects, such as history, social sciences, math, and even fine arts to connect with my students. For this particular lesson, I mainly focus on history and political science.

In the novel 1984 , privacy both public and private did not exist. Orwell’s slogan: ‘Ignorance is Strength’ is truer than we know. The less one knows the better. Before beginning the novel, I play a small video clip of Orwell, himself, just before he died warning about the future. Since Orwell wrote the novel in 1948, no one believed what he said was true. Many even thought that he was delusional during his last year. (I mean the title of the novel was just switching the last two digits of the year 48 to 84). However, whether it was coincidence or not, the Apple computer came out in 1984. After showing the short video clip of George Orwell’s warning, I showed the original 1984 commercial of the Macintosh computer. This got the students to talk.

I collected various articles beginning in 1984 through 2018. In their groups, the students read over them one by one where they started to make connections between what was similar about how technology evolved. I then pull out my iPhone to open the app “find my iPhone” to locate my husband. Now, normally, I do not have my phone in class. But for this particular lesson, I wanted to show how easily technology has not only evolved but our privacy has diminished.

I locate my husband and start pinging his phone for location. He knows what I’m going to do in class so he calls me (I have him on speaker) and asks me why I’m tracking him. Now before he calls, I tell the students where he is located. When he calls, I ask him his location. The reason he was on speaker was for the students to hear where he was located. Prior to the call, I told my students that he was located off Route 6 next to the gas station. When asked his location, he confirmed it. The phone conversation ends, and the class conversation begins.

This all connects to current events. This activity takes about two days because I want them to go home and think before the next lesson. Many actually went home to research “invasion of privacy” on their school computers. Because, after all, I can track what they research outside of my classroom. When they find this out, they say I violated their First Amendment rights. So, I have them look up First Amendment rights and I asked them what I exactly infringed upon. What they didn’t realize is that it’s the Fourth Amendment rights they were thinking about not the First. They were speechless.

With this one activity, my students are becoming more aware of current events. However, it wasn’t this one lesson that we connected to current events. Every day was a new lesson; whether we were reading the novel or not, I was able to relate to what was happening in the news.

Even studying short stories and past news about events, such as the lynching of Emmett Till, students were appalled at what happened. We studied a brief overview of the Civil Rights Movement and connected it to To Kill A Mockingbird , by Harper Lee. In 2017, evidence came out that the woman, Carolyn Bryant, Till “whistled” at wasn’t telling the truth. This encouraged them to find other articles about those wrongly accused no matter of race, gender, or religion.

It’s not just lessons that we teach based on the curriculum. If we can connect those lessons to skills students need to succeed, then we are doing our job.

Discussing current events across subject areas

Sarah Cooper teaches 8th grade U.S. history and is dean of studies at Flintridge Preparatory School in La Canada, Calif. She is the author of two books, Creating Citizens (Routledge, 2018) and Making History Mine (Stenhouse, 2009). Sarah speaks at conferences and writes for MiddleWeb’s Future of History blog, and she lives just outside Los Angeles with her husband and two sons:

We can link current events to what we teach in the classroom in at least two ways—through content and through character.

With content, teachers sometimes wonder how they can justify adding current events to their lessons if they’re not teaching contemporary history or politics.

A surefire way to make such connections is through themes, layering relevant pieces over the planks of an existing curriculum.

For instance, a science teacher can bring in articles all year about scientific ethics, and an English teacher can discuss pieces about group identity or the perils and promises of technology. A teacher of ancient world history can talk about the thrills of modern archaeology. World-language teachers can find pieces about contemporary cultures and politics, and arts teachers can check out the arts section of their local newspaper or alternative weekly.

With character, the relevance of current events expands even more. Many classroom teachers, from math to P.E., build norms with their students as school starts. Later in the year, if you see an article or video that reinforces one of these expectations, you can bring it in to discuss.

In my experience, students especially love stories that focus on positive human interactions, to lighten the daily news litany they scroll through online. One excellent resource for such stories is the Huffington Post’s Good News page . Such stories also generally avoid political partisanship, which even veteran social studies teachers can find hard to navigate.

Finally, don’t feel you have to do a lot! Even five minutes each day, or each week, can open up conversations you never would have had otherwise. And, if you bring in articles frequently enough, your students may start sending you what they find, creating a dialogue that can last far beyond a year in your classroom.

Don’t avoid controversial topics

Mike Kaechele is a history teacher in Grand Rapids, Mich., and National Faculty for PBLWorks. He believes in student-centered learning by giving kids authentic opportunities to do real work with local community partners:

Current events are a great way to engage students in the classroom. Project-Based Learning is an excellent structure to introduce current events. One of the key components of PBL is “authenticity,” and current events make content relevant. I use current events as “entry events” to get kids fired up about the launch of a project. My final products often ask kids to apply lessons from history to propose solutions to current issues that they present to community partners.

In social studies, current events can be used as an entry point to have students trace the causes of current problems to their source. The past can give both warnings and solutions to current problems that need to be addressed. I always use current contexts to launch history projects to give students motivation to learn about the past. For example the Driving Question, “Why do terrorists hate the United States?” requires students to do an in-depth study of American foreign policy of the last century to understand why certain countries do not see the United States as the “hero” on the world stage.

Current events engage students by shedding light on the tensions between American ideals and realities. They force students to be critical thinkers, considering multiple perspectives throughout history. Oftentimes, content is centered around sterile textbooks that do not address current realities. Embracing the controversy of current events engages students in critical thinking. For example, current arguments about immigration could lead to an exploration of our complex history of both welcoming some groups of immigrants while simultaneously discriminating against others with quotas and unjust laws. Students should be shown that current events do not happen in a vacuum but often are seated in a long history of controversy in our country.

Ideally. current events lead students to be proactive in coming up with solutions to the complex, connected society that they are inheriting. If we want students to awaken to the importance of our core content, then current events can be the hook for engagement by addressing real-world issues that their generation will be forced to solve. So instead of avoiding controversy, embrace it and teach students to consider all sides of current issues before taking up a strong position.

Articles & Podcasts

Jessica Torres serves as an educational specialist for ESC Region 12 in the heart of Texas. Formerly an assistant principal and Montessori teacher, Mrs. Torres is passionate about developing educators to provide innovative approaches and experiences for all learners as they pursue their unique interests and learning passions:

Our world has become a very small global community. Social media has allowed our news to become instantaneous in our society, allowing us to “know” what is happening before all of the facts have been clarified and the details are drawn out. For anyone living in today’s media-driven world, it is imperative that they be able to decipher between the facts and the rest, including propaganda, bias, disinformation, and click-bait. With this in mind, discussing current events in the classroom has become more than a fleeting idea—it has become an integral part of ensuring that our students are informed and prepared to face tough topics head-on with a background of knowledge and facts to support their opinions. Here are a few ideas and resources that I use to easily weave current events into the classroom each day and help students decipher between the muck and the news.

• Newsela - The article archive provides access to the world’s news in a student-friendly format that allows the teacher to differentiate for Lexile level or reading ability. Teachers can create assignments from the articles on Google Classroom or share them with the whole group. Each article comes with its own comprehension questions and writing prompt that can be used to engage students in conversation. Allowing students time to discuss their thoughts and emotions in a safe space, such as the classroom, encourages them to listen and think about other perspectives.
• Fact vs. Fiction book by Jennifer LaGarde and Darren Hudgins - Everyone needs help determining what’s real and what’s been spun lately. This book, written by two engaging educators, helps us develop strategies to use with ourselves and our students to safeguard our hearts and minds from inaccurate news and sources. Developing strong critical-thinking skills are the focus of this book, and a variety of resources are provided to help teachers as they share news items in their classrooms.
• Podcasts - Either listening to podcasts or having students create their own podcasts based on what they have learned from news stories can be extremely powerful and clarifying. Many students thoroughly enjoy listening to someone “talk” about the news rather than read about it. For other students, having the opportunity to express their own thoughts or perspective on an event feels personal and encourages ownership. Additionally, podcasts are known to be brief and completely scalable to fit the needs of the classroom.

“The worst ways to bring current events into the classroom”

Renee Hobbs is professor of communication studies and director of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island’s Harrington School of Communication and Media. An expert on digital and media literacy, Hobbs is the author of the forthcoming book Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education for a Digital Age . Hobbs provides media-literacy curriculum resources for K-12 and college faculty and has offered professional-development programs on four continents:

Let’s start with identifying two of the worst ways to bring current events into the classroom: require students to maintain a current events journal or stage a debate about ongoing news and current events topic. The current events journal is a too-common assignment in middle school and high school where students must write short summaries of news, following a particular format. It’s an assignment that makes paying attention to news and current events a chore, a form of homework, and something to be dreaded. Assignments like this are not likely to inspire students to want to be informed on current events or encourage their intellectual curiosity about the news.

Classroom debate activities are well-meaning efforts intended to promote understanding of controversial public issues. But when students are positioned to take opposing sides and encouraged to gather evidence, argue their side and “win,” this legalistic practice actually leads adolescents in the wrong direction. As an instructional practice, debate can work against the development of genuine understanding and knowledge. Because debates promote competition, it does not model the deliberative and reflective practice of activating intellectual curiosity and modeling humility. When it comes to learning, the goal is not winning—it’s understanding.

Learning Civil Discourse

Instead of debate, students need to practice the art of perspective-taking on news and current events. In a five-minute daily discussion, start with a question to the whole group: “What are all the things you have heard about this topic, regardless of whether you believe them or not?” This invites general sharing and gathering of ideas, and it frees students up to offer ideas without being associated with or having to defend them.

In this kind of activity, students can share information without isolating themselves from their group. Plus, this method does not alienate the students who aren’t familiar with the news event or controversy under discussion. There’s no penalty for not knowing. Students can learn about current events from their peers.

Some teachers maintain a classroom rule for current events discussions: “You only have a right to an opinion if you have evidence or experience to back it up. If you don’t, then ask questions and listen and learn.” When students hear this, they feel a sense of relief. Students can show that they are participating by asking questions and taking notes. High school social studies teacher Emily Glankler explains it this way: “I’m trying to address a social problem we have in society today. Part of the problem is that people think they are entitled to an opinion on everything.” The everyday ritual of talking about current events for five minutes a day all year long models the practice of becoming a lifelong learner and an engaged citizen.

(This is the first post in a two-part series. You can see Part 2 here. )

The question of the week is:

What are the best ways to connect current events to what we’re teaching in the classroom?

Thanks to Suzie, Kristen, Sarah, Mike, Jessica, and Renee for their contributions.

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It’s titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching .

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The learning network | 50 ways to teach with current events.

50 Ways to Teach With Current Events

Current Events

Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.

• See all in Current Events »
• See all lesson plans »

Updated, July, 2016

How can we make sure that students are informed about what’s going on around the world? That they are armed with the tools to be able to distinguish between opinion and fact; between evidence-based statements and empty rhetoric; between sensationalism and solid journalism? Just like most other things in life, the best way to do all that is through practice.

In honor of National News Engagement Day , here are 50 ideas to help teachers bring current events into the classroom, grouped below by category:

Reading and Writing

Speaking and Listening

Games and Quizzes

Photographs, Illustrations, Videos and Infographics

• Design and Creativity

Making Connections

Building Skills

Some ideas work best as regular routines, others as one-shot activities. Many might be easier to use together with the new K-12 New York Times school subscription , but all of them could be implemented using the free links to Times articles on The Learning Network — or with any other trusted news source.

In our comments section, we hope you’ll share how you teach current events.

1. Read the Paper and Find What Interests You: If we could recommend just one thing teenagers should do with the news, it’s this. Just read and discover what you care about. Every summer we try to promote this with our Summer Reading Contest , and we hope teachers are continuing this student-centered approach now that school has started.

You might invite your students to pick one article each week and write about why they chose it, perhaps using student winners from our summer contest as models. Our Reading Log (PDF) might also help.

Then, set aside time for students to share their picks with a partner, or even with a wider audience through social media.

2. Share Your Opinion: Each school day we publish a new Student Opinion question about an article in The Times. Students can participate in our moderated discussions online, or you can borrow from hundreds of published questions for class discussions or personal writing from 2016 , 2015 , 2014 and beyond .

3. Read About News-Making Teenagers: Every month we publish a collection of all the recent Times articles and multimedia that feature teenagers . Students can use this list to identify someone they admire, learn how other teenagers are taking action or make connections to issues in their own school and community.

4. Find ‘News You Can Use': Use The Times, or any other news source, to find things like movie or video game reviews, recipes , sports scores, health information , and how-to’s on subjects from social media to personal finance that can help improve your life.

5. Ask and Answer Questions: Each day we choose an important or interesting Times story and pose the basic news questions — Who, What, Where, When, Why and How — in our News Q’s feature. Students can first answer the “right there” questions that test reading comprehension, then move on to the deeper critical thinking questions, then write their own “News Q’s” about articles they select.

6. Write an Editorial: Have your students pick an issue that matters to them, whether climate change, gender roles or police brutality, and then write an evidence-based persuasive essay like the editorials The New York Times publishes every day. They can practice all year, but save their best work to submit in our Student Editorial Contest in February. Each year we select 10 winners along with dozens of runners-up and honorable mentions from nearly 5,000 student editorials.

7. Compare News Sources: Different papers, magazines and websites treat the news differently. You might have students compare lead stories or, via the Newseum’s daily gallery, front pages . Or, you might just pick one article about a divisive topic (politics, war, social issues) and see how different news sources have handled the subject.

8. Be a Journalist Yourself: Perhaps the most powerful way to engage with current events is to document them yourself, as a student journalist . Write articles or opinion pieces for your school or community paper about how a national or global issue is playing out in your community. Contribute comments online or letters to the editor reacting to news stories you’ve read. Use social media to document what you witness when news happens near you. Take video of local events and interview participants. Or, suggest ways that you and others your age can take action on an issue you care about. The National News Engagement Day Pinterest board has ideas like this and many more.

9. Hold a Debate: Want your students to be able to develop arguments and support a point of view on current issues? We offer numerous resources to help, including: ideas for different classroom debate formats ; ways to use The Times’ Room for Debate feature in the classroom; and a graphic organizer for gathering evidence on both sides of an argument (PDF).

10. Interview Fellow Students: Ask students to generate a question related to an issue they’re reading about, and then conduct a one-question interview (PDF) with their classmates. The room will be buzzing with students asking and answering questions. For more detailed instructions on this activity, consult our teacher instructions .

11. Brainstorm Solutions to the World’s Problems: Why not put students in the role of policymakers? They can look closely at an issue covered in The Times and brainstorm possible solutions together, using our Problem-Solution handout (PDF) to take notes. Then they can work together to draft a policy proposal, perhaps one that suggests a local solution to the problem, and present it to the class or to the school board or city council.

12. Create a News-Inspired Theatrical Performance: Whether a simple monologue or a full Reader’s Theater event, our series, Drama Strategies to Use With Any Day’s Times, can help you use simple theater exercises to spur discussion and thinking about current events.

13. Hold a Mock Campaign and Election: Looking to teach an upcoming election? Let students take the role of campaign strategists and candidates. Our Election Unit can be adapted for any election to get students researching candidates, studying issues, trying out campaign strategies and holding their own mock election. Or, choose another approach from our 10 ways to teach about Election Day or our list of resources for the 2016 presidential election .

14. Organize a Teach-In, Gallery Walk or Social Action on a Topic: Our country and world face complex issues — war, drug abuse, climate change, poverty — to name a few. Students working in groups can follow a topic in The Times, and then organize a classroom or whole school “teach-in” to inform their peers about topics in the news and decide how to take action. Alternatively, they can create a classroom gallery of photographs, maps, infographics, articles, editorial cartoons, essays, videos and whatever else they can find to immerse others in the topic. Ask yourself and your classmates, what can people our age do to effect change around this issue?

15. See How You Do Compared to Others on Our Weekly News Quiz: Have students test how well they’ve been keeping up with the week’s news with our 10-question current events quiz. The answers provide an explanation along with links to relevant Times articles so students can learn more. Then, in December, students can take our annual year-end news quiz, like this one from 2015 .

16. Play Fantasy Geopolitics: Have students draft teams of countries, similar to how they might draft players in a fantasy sports league, and then accumulate points based on how often those countries appear in The New York Times . Classrooms can track point scores and trade countries using the resources on the Fantasy Geopolitics site, a game created by Eric Nelson, a social studies teacher in Minnesota.

17. Battle Others in Bingo: Encourage students to get to know the newspaper — digital or print — by playing one of our many versions of bingo: Page One Bingo , Science, Health and Technology Bingo , World History Bingo or Geography Bingo (PDF).

18. Do a Scavenger Hunt: Send your students searching for answers to our New York Times Scavenger Hunt (PDF) as a way to become more familiar with how a newspaper covers the day’s news.

19. Mix and Match Headlines, Stories and Photos: Cut up articles, headlines and photos into three separate piles and mix them up, then challenge students in groups to see who can correctly match them in the shortest amount of time. When they’re done, they can fill out our related handout (PDF). Our teacher instructions provide more details.

20. Hunt for the Three Branches of Government in the Paper: What articles can you find in a week’s worth of papers about the different branches of the United States government? Record what you find with our Branching Out handout (PDF).

21. Analyze Photographs to Build Visual Literacy Skills: On Mondays we ask students to look closely at an image using the three-question facilitation method created by our partners at Visual Thinking Strategies: What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can you find? Students can participate in the activity by commenting in our weekly “What’s Going On In This Picture?” moderated conversation.

Alternatively, you might prefer to select your own news photos. Slideshows, such as the regular “Pictures of the Day” feature, are always a great place to find compelling images related to current events.

22. Interpret Editorial Cartoons and “Op-Art”: Patrick Chappatte publishes editorial cartoons on topics ranging from ISIS to the Ukraine. You can use the Visual Thinking Strategies facilitation method to ask open-ended questions, letting students make meaning out of the cartoons. Or, have students analyze some of the “Op-Art” on the Opinion pages of The Times. How do these images make an argument? Students can also try their hand at drawing their own editorial cartoons , and then enter them into our annual editorial cartoon contest .

23. Decipher an Infographic: Take an infographic or chart in The Times and have students explain what it shows using sentences. Our handout “A Graph Is Worth a Thousand Words, or At Least 50″ (PDF) can serve as a guide.

24. Create an Infographic: Or, do the opposite, and have students take the data provided in a Times article to create their own graph or chart (PDF). The Reader Ideas “From Article to Infographic: Translating Information About ‘Sneakerheads’” and “Telling Stories With Data” suggest ways to approach this task.

25. Illustrate the News: Students can draw an illustration that captures some aspect of an article. Using our handout “The One-Pager” (PDF), students accompany their illustration with a quote from the article as well as a question for the journalist or someone mentioned in the article.

26. Write a Postcard: Or, maybe having students create a mock postcard to or from a subject in a Times article would work better for your class.

27. Say What’s Unsaid: Another option is assigning students to add speech and thought bubbles (PDF) to a Times photograph to communicate something they learned by reading an article.

28. Create Storyboards: Students can break a story into various scenes that they illustrate (PDF), like a storyboard, and then write a caption or choose a quote from the article that captures the essence of each frame. Our teacher instructions can help with this activity, as can a recent lesson plan on using storyboards to inspire close reading .

Creative Writing and Design

29. Write a Rap or Song: Each December, we ask students to compose a rap about important and memorable events from the past year. Get inspired by the winners from our 2015 contest , and start polishing your rhymes for this year.

30. Make a Timeline: Students can design their own timelines, using photographs, captions and selected quotes, to understand and keep track of complex current events topics. Times models can help since the paper regularly publishes timelines on all kinds of topics, whether Mariano Rivera’s career, the evolution of Facebook or the Ferguson protests

31. Create a Twitter Feed: Or, students can create a fake Twitter feed documenting a news story, paying attention to time stamps and author tone, such as we suggested in this lesson about the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

32. Explore a Particular Community: Find reporting on a community of which you’re a member — whether an ethnic, religious, professional, school or artistic group, or any other — and analyze how it has been reported on. Then use these ideas for finding ways you can help express what, in your experience, makes this group unique. What do you think people need to know about this community and how can you communicate that?

33. Write a Found Poem: Every year we invite students to take any Times article or articles published since 1851 and mix and combine the words and phrases in them into a new piece. Take a look at the work of our winners for inspiration, but the exercise can be done with anything from a science essay to an obituary to an archival article reporting on a famous event from history.

34. Make a News Broadcast: Students can turn an article they read in The Times into an evening news broadcast , with an anchor, on-the-ground reporter and interview subjects.

35. Create an Audio Podcast: Listen to some Times models , then get students to create a podcast (PDF) of a news story instead.

36. Connect the Past to Today: Help students tie what they’re studying in history class to what’s going on in the world today. We regularly do this in both our Text to Text feature as well as our social-studies-focused lesson plans . You might also consider following @nytarchives on Twitter and our own “Throwback Thursday” posts to see echoes of the past in today’s headlines — or, visit Times Machine on your own to view by date or through search terms 129 years of Times journalism as it originally appeared.

37. Pair the News With Literature and Poetry: Encourage students to look for connections between literary themes and current events. Our Poetry Pairings and Text to Text lesson plans can provide inspiration, as can our Classic Literature posts .

38. Think Like a Historian: What events make the history books? How and from whose point of view are they told? Have students research a current events topic, and then write a paper arguing whether this topic will make “history” and how it will be remembered.

39. Connect The Times to Your Own Life: Have students make connections between the articles they read in The New York Times and their own life, other texts and the world around them using our Connecting The New York Times to Your World (PDF) handout.

40. Consider Censorship Through Any Day’s Front Page: What if we didn’t have freedom of the press? Ask students to take the front page of any New York Times and put an X over the stories that might be censored if our government controlled the press. You might use our Censoring the Press (PDF) handout to help.

41. Take Informed Action: When students become more informed about the world, they can get inspired to become civically active and engaged in their communities . Have students brainstorm issues that matter to them, either at the local, national or global level, and then design a plan of action for how they can begin to make the change they hope to see in the world.

42. Determine Reliability of Sources : How do we distinguish good journalism from propaganda or just shoddy reporting? Students can use simple mnemonics, like those developed at the Center for News Literacy , to evaluate the reliability of an article and the sources it relies on. For example, apply the acronym “IMVAIN” (PDF) to an article to surface whether sources (and the information they provide) are Independent, Multiple, Verifiable, Authoritative, Informed and Named. This and many other strategies can be found in our lesson on “fake news vs. real news .

43. Distinguish Fact From Opinion: Even within The Times, students can get confused when navigating between news and opinion. What’s the difference? Use our Skills Practice lesson on distinguishing between the two to help students learn the basics, then go on to our lesson “News and ‘News Analysis’,” to help students learn how to navigate between news reporting and Opinion pieces within news outlets.

44. Start With What Students Already Know: Students are often aware of current events on their own, even before topics come up in school. When delving into a subject, start by asking students what they’ve heard or seen, and what questions they already have. Use our K/W/L Chart (PDF) or a concept map to chart what students say and think. And this post , about reading strategies for informational text, has much more.

45. Identify Cause and Effect: Much of journalism involves tracking the ripple effects of big news events or societal trends. Our handout (PDF) can help students get started, as can this Facing History “iceberg” strategy that helps learners think about what’s “under the surface.” Another resource? This Skills Practice lesson .

46. Compare and Contrast: Venn diagrams and T-charts (PDF) are often useful for comparing two topics or issues in the news, and our Text-to-Text handout can help students compare two or more texts, such as an article and a historical document.

47. Read Closely: By using a double-entry journal (PDF), students can become better readers of informational text by noting comments, questions and observations alongside lines or details they select from a text.

48. Support Opinions With Facts: Whether students are writing their own persuasive arguments, or reading those written by other people, they need to understand how authors support opinions with facts. Students can practice by reading Times Opinion pieces and identifying how authors construct arguments using opinions supported by facts (PDF). Then they can develop their own evidence-based counterpoints.

49. Summarize an Article: Having students pull out the basic information of a news story — the five W’s and an H (PDF) can help them better understand a current events topic. Here is a lesson plan with a summary quiz and many ideas for practice.

And Finally…

50. Learn From Our Mistakes: There are several places in the newspaper where you can see corrections and analysis of where The Times has made a misstep. For a weekly critique of grammar, usage and style in The Times, see the After Deadline series. For a list of each day’s corrections, go to the bottom of the Today’s Paper section and click “corrections.” And for a full discussion of issues readers and the public raise around Times coverage, visit the Public Editor column . What can you learn from the mistakes The Times makes, and from how they are addressed publicly?

Let us know in the comment section below how you teach current events in your class, or which ideas from the above list inspired you.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

Great ideas! Thanks for sharing.

I am currently a graduate student working towards a certificate and Masters in Special Education. One of the biggest pushes in our program is to ensure that we are doing the things necessary within the classroom to become a critical transformative multicultural educator. Through my studies and observational experiences, I believe there is no better way to prepare studenst for the real world than connecting them to current events. It can often be comfotable to keep students in a world within the walls of the classroom. Yet, in doing so students only adapt to only being able to staticly think about the environments they are exposed to. Through these amazing and creative ways students can evolve their thought processes and become dynamic learners interest in the how the world around them works. It is through current events that we as educators can empower our students to become advocates for their own lives. Thanks so much for sharing and could not agree more with message.

Here are some more current event brain boosters: //www.educationworld.com/a_special/current_events.shtml

! Use current events as an activator to start each class and sometimes we follow the topic the full school year. Great short videos as well. Thanks for the lesson plans ideas as well.

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Our current events toolkit offers tools and strategies to help teachers organize discussions on current events in their classrooms. We recommend that teachers who are just getting started addressing current events with their students—or who are looking to learn new strategies for engaging students in discussions about the news or controversial topics—begin by exploring the resources in the toolkit.

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This toolkit is designed to be flexible. You can use all of the resources or choose a selection best suited to your classroom. It includes:

• Tools for organizing discussions about current events
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Inside this toolkit, tools for teaching current events, teaching current events: educator guide, fostering civil discourse: difficult classroom conversations in a diverse democracy, recommended teaching strategies, head, heart, conscience, contracting, journals in the classroom, color, symbol, image, graffiti boards, s-i-t: surprising, interesting, troubling, four corners, save the last word for me, big paper: building a silent conversation, barometer: taking a stand on controversial issues, town hall circle, learn to listen, listen to learn, iceberg diagrams, close viewing protocol, see, think, wonder, connect, extend, challenge, toolbox for care, connecting the past to the present using oral history, you might also be interested in…, resources for civic education in california, resources for civic education in massachusetts, civics for all resources for nyc public schools, current events in the classroom, materials for from reflection to action, introducing the concept of race, addressing racist and dehumanising language, creating a society in which everyone can thrive, people's assembly, discussing race and racism in the classroom, mob violence, human behavior, and the capitol insurrection, antisemitic conflation: what is the impact of conflating all jews with the actions and policies of the israeli government, unlimited access to learning. more added every month..

Facing History & Ourselves is designed for educators who want to help students explore identity, think critically, grow emotionally, act ethically, and participate in civic life. It’s hard work, so we’ve developed some go-to professional learning opportunities to help you along the way.

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Twenty-five great ideas for teaching current events.

Looking for ways to work news into your classroom curriculum? Check out these great ideas for connecting current events to all subjects.

Young Americans today know less and care less about what's going on in the world than young Americans of previous generations did. Those were the conclusions presented in a 1995 report from the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press (now called the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). "On average, only 20 percent of respondents aged 18 to 29 paid close attention to the stories covered in the News Interest Index [an index of top news stories]." Attentiveness rose to 23 percent among respondents 30 to 49 and to 29 percent among those 50 years and older.

So what can be done to raise students' interest in and awareness of the stories making news headlines?

Another study, highlighted in the introduction to the Education World story Why Teach Current Events? indicates that the more exposure students have to newspapers and current events the more likely they are to be aware and interested in learning and reading more about them. Indeed, including current events in the school curriculum can go a long way toward developing lifelong newsreaders!

Education World is pleased to offer 25 activities -- activities intended to help teachers make use of newspapers and the internet to help students make sense of the news. Also included, at the end of the activity list, is a list of additional activities and Internet resources.

The activities

This first activity won't make better or more interested news readers of your students -- but it was too interesting not to include in our list! Taken from an ERIC document, Twenty Ideas for Teaching Science Using the Newspaper, the first activity provides a recipe for keeping old newspaper clippings from turning yellow. Try it!

Preserving the news! Dissolve a milk of magnesia tablet in a quart of water, and let it stand overnight. Pour the mixture into a flat baking pan large enough to hold the news clippings that you want to preserve. Place the clippings in the solution so they're completely covered by the liquid. Let them soak for an hour. Then take them out and pat them dry. They'll be crisp and new for a long time to come! (This works because the magnesium carbide in the solution neutralizes the acid in the paper; it is the acid that makes the newspaper yellow.)

Listening for details. Students can do this activity individually or in small groups. Ask students to listen carefully as you read aloud a story from the day's newspaper. (Story length will vary by grade level.) Then hand out to students a sheet with questions about details from the story. The higher the grade, the harder (more detailed) questions you can ask. Invite students or groups to respond to the questions. Who caught the most details?

News-mapping. Post a map (a community, state, U.S., or world map, depending on the focus of your current events curriculum) on a bulletin board. Post stories around the map and string yarn from each story to the location on the map where the story takes place.

More news-mapping. Take a look at the front page of the local newspaper each day. Plot on the map the location of each of the news stories on that page. Invite students to use the scale of miles on the map to figure out how far each place in the news is from your community. If longitude and latitude is a skill your students are expected to master, students might plot each location's longitude and latitude to the nearest degree.

News scavenger hunts. Provide students with a list of things to find on the front page of today's newspaper. Students might hunt in the paper for math-related words and terms (a percent, a measurement of distance, a cost, an address, and a fraction) or grammar-related terms (a present-tense verb, a past-tense verb, a proper noun, an abbreviation, a colon, and a list separated by commas). Or students might scavenge the main sports page for a list of sports-related terms. Or you might let students work in small groups to hunt for as many nouns (or proper nouns, or verbs) they can find in a story or on the front page. The group that finds the most is the winner!

A to Z adjectives. Each student writes the letters from A to Z on a sheet of paper. Challenge students to search the day's front page (or the entire newspaper, if your students are older) for an adjective that begins with each letter of the alphabet. Students cut the adjectives from the newspaper and paste them on their list.

Graphing the news. Pull facts from the news that lend themselves to graphing (e.g., the cost of a postage stamp, the population of your community, the number of barrels of oil imported). Provide students with the information needed and invite them to create a bar, line, or picture graph to depict that information.

Scanning the page. Provide a copy of a news story for this activity that teaches the skill of "skimming for information," or let all students work with their own copy of the front page of the same daily paper. Provide a list of words from the story/front page and invite students to skim the page to find as many of those words as they can. Set a time limit. Who finds the most words before time runs out?

Abbreviation/acronym search. The names of many common organizations are shortened to their acronym form when used in news stories. For example, the American Broadcasting Corporation becomes ABC, the National Organization for Women becomes NOW, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration becomes NASA. Also, abbreviations are commonly used for state names and some titles, such as Tex. (for Texas) or Sen. (for Senator). Invite students to work in groups to find and create a list of acronyms and abbreviations they find in the daily newspaper. (Note: You might include the classified ad section in your students' search. Many abbreviations can be found there.)

Local, national, or international? To develop your students' understanding of a news story's "place," create a bulletin board divided into three sections. Invite students to bring in from home news stories that might fit into each of the three sections. News of the community or state will be posted in the "Local" section. News of interest around the country will fit in the "National" section. And world news will be posted in the "International" section.

Headline match. Collect ten news stories and separate the story text from the headline. Number each headline from 1 to 10. Assign a letter, from A to J, to each story text. Invite students to match each headline to the correct text.

The five Ws. Introduce students to the 5Ws found in most news stories. Often, the five Ws are introduced in a story's opening paragraph. Create an overhead transparency of a major news story. Invite students to talk about the who , where , when , what , and why of the story. Circle or highlight and label the areas of the story that tell each of the five Ws. Then provide each student or group of students with a news story and ask them to report to the class the who , where , when , what , and why of the story. Students might underline each of the five Ws with a different colored crayon.

A five W variation. Provide each students with a news story. The student lists on a separate sheet of paper the who , where , when , what , and why of the story. Then the students' papers are collected and redistributed so no student has his or her own sheet. Each students takes a look at their five W list and writes the opening paragraph of a news story based on that information. At the end of the activity, students share their stories and the original stories to see how they compare. How accurate were the students' stories?

Sequencing the facts. Select a news story that includes a clear sequence of events. Write each of the facts of the story on a separate strip of paper. Invite students to order the sentence strips to tell the story in its correct sequence. (Option: Once you've done this activity, you might invite students to do the same thing. They can retell the events of a story in five simple sentences, each written on a separate strip of paper. Then each student shares the activity he/she created and a copy of the original story with another student, who gets to try the activity.)

Why is it news? Each day, newspaper editors around the world must make decisions about which stories they will publish. Stories make it into newspapers for many different reasons. Invite students to look at the stories that have made the front page of a local newspaper during the last few days and to talk about why each of those stories made headlines. Among the reasons students might come up with are these:

• Timeliness -- News that is happening right now, news of interest to readers right now.
• Relevance -- The story happened nearby or is about a concern of local interest.
• Magnitude -- The story is great in size or number; for example, a tornado that destroys a couple houses might not make the news but a story about a tornado that devastates a community would be very newsworthy.
• Unexpectedness -- Something unusual, or something that occurs without warning.
• Impact -- News that will affect a large number of readers.
• Reference to someone famous or important -- News about a prominent person or personality.
• Oddity -- A unique or unusual situation.
• Conflict -- A major struggle in the news.
• Reference to something negative -- Bad news often "sells" better than good news.
• Continuity -- A follow-up or continuation to a story that has been in the news or is familiar.
• Emotions -- Emotions (such as fear, jealousy, love, or hate) increase interest in a story.
• Progress -- News of new hope, new achievement, new improvements.

In the days ahead, study each front-page story and talk about why editors decided to put the story on page one. Which reason(s) on the students' list would explain the newsworthiness of the story?

Voice your opinion. Set up a tape recorder in a convenient location in the classroom. Pose to students an opinion question and let them think about it for a few days. When students are ready, they can take turns expressing their opinions to the recorder. This can be a little less threatening for some students than talking in front of a class would be. Later in the week, once all students have had a chance to express their opinions, you might begin a class discussion of the question by playing back the tape or by sharing select opinions that you cull from it.

Charting the weather. The weather page in the newspaper can be the starting point for many great classroom activities. The class might follow the local weather for a week or a month and create charts and graphs to show the ups and downs of temperatures. Or each student might follow the weather of a different city in the United States (or the world) for a set period. Students can use the collected information to compare weather (high and low temperatures, total precipitation, sky conditions, etc.) in different places.

Create historical newspapers. Challenge students to create a newspaper about a period of time they are studying. If students are studying U.S. history, they might include stories such as "Pilgrims and Indians Gather for Feast" and "Lincoln Wins Election." The stories relate the facts as students have researched them. Students should include each of the five Ws in their first paragraphs.

Plan a healthful menu. After a study of nutrition, invite students to plan a healthful menu for a day. Provide three paper plates for each student; each plate represents a different meal -- breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Invite students to find and cut out from newspapers, magazines, store ads, etc., pictures of foods and to arrange them into healthful meals on the three plates. Invite students to share the results, which will make a colorful and attractive bulletin board!

You be the editor. Rewrite a news story to include ten errors of punctuation, capitalization, or grammar. (Emphasize skills your students are working on in class wherever possible.) Invite students to "edit" your story free of errors!

There's plenty of math in the news too!

Figuring an average. Students might collect classified "Homes for Sale" ads for ten homes in a given area or for homes of a given size (e.g., two-bedroom homes). Invite students to figure from those ads the average cost for a home. (Or students might figure the average rent for homes of similar characteristics from the "Apartments for Rent" section of the newspaper.)

More ad math. Invite each student to choose a job ad from the newspaper classifieds; the ad must include a yearly salary figure. (Teach students that the term "40K" often seen in job ads is short for $40,000.) Invite students to figure from that salary figure the average monthly, weekly, daily (based on a 5-day week), and hourly (based on an 8-hour day) salary for that job.

Ad math #3. Provide a group of five ads from a local newspaper and the section of the paper that describes how much it costs to place an ad. Invite students to use the per-word or per-line cost information to figure out how much it cost to run each of the five ads.

Guess-timating! Provide each student with the copy of a news story. (Story length will vary depending on grade level.) Invite students to count the number of words in each of the first five lines of the story and to guess-timate, based on that figure, how many words long the whole story is. Older students might average the number of words in the first five lines and consider half-lines and other elements of a story to come up with a more accurate figure. Let students share their estimates and how they arrived at them. Then inform students of the exact number of words in the story (which you have pre-counted). A prize goes to the winner!

Furnish a home! Invite students to use store ads to figure the cost of furnishing a home. You might provide a list of items for each of four rooms, including a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, and a bedroom. For example, living room furniture might include a couch and side chair, a coffee table, a television, and an air conditioner. Older students might also need to figure the cost of carpeting the living room! (Options: Provide students with a budget for furnishing a four-room home and let them set priorities for the furnishings they'll select. For older students, state and local sales taxes might be figured as part of the total cost.)

Some great Internet "current events" resources

These activities are worth checking out.

Classroom debate formats Looking to hold a debate in your classroom? Here are some simple, straightforward formats from which to choose.

Organization of a Newspaper Students demonstrate their knowledge of the parts of a newspaper.

Parts of a News Article Kids use the story of the Wright brothers to learn about how a news article is organized.

Creating a Class Newspaper Creating a classroom newspaper is a perfect opportunity to develop students' writing skills.

More on Creating a Class Newspaper

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Newseum This museum of news calls itself "the most interactive museum in the world."

Article by Gary Hopkins Education World® Editor in Chief Copyright © 2017 Education World

 Last updated 01/20/2017

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Sign up for our free weekly newsletter and receive top education news, lesson ideas, teaching tips and more! No thanks, I don't need to stay current on what works in education! COPYRIGHT 1996-2016 BY EDUCATION WORLD, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. COPYRIGHT 1996 - 2024 BY EDUCATION WORLD, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. SchoolNotes.com The Educator's Network Current Events Subject Guide Highlight current events in your classroom. Each Friday, Flocabulary brings you the top news stories from the past seven days with The Week in Rap and The Week in Rap Junior . On this page, you'll find subject-wide lesson plans and implementation suggestions to help you make current events a centerpiece of your classroom. Subject-Wide Lesson Plans Using Language for Purpose In this lesson, students will identify and choose between academic and social English in their writing and speech. They will watch and respond to prompts in the Week in Rap for a range of purposes as they gain practice with this important language skill. How Stories Are Chosen Use this lesson in conjunction with The Week in Rap to focus on why the specific headlines were selected for the song, discover the criteria used, and then have students in the position of picking the headlines around criteria they develop themselves. Analyze a News Story News stories are written in a very clear way. Why are they so easy to read? Students will find out. Using the inverted pyramid as a guide, students will analyze the structure of a news story, and practice finding the main idea while they're at it. Worth 1,000 Words Use this lesson in conjunction with The Week in Rap to facilitate a discussion and short research assignment that focus on the role that visual elements, graphics and headlines play in communicating information and opinion in the news. Debate the News Capitalize on controversy. Debating a Week in Rap news story can help students clarify their understanding of a topic, develop opinions and understand other views of current events. Debates can range from formal argumentation to a more casual discussion. And in all cases, they encourage interactions and socialization in the classroom. We've provided some guidelines and a worksheet to hold a formal debate as well as tips for more casual opinionated discussions. A Day in the Life, Internationally Each Week in Rap includes international news stories. This lesson will ask students to choose a country mentioned, draw out key details from the news article, and use these details to think about how their lives would be different if they lived in that country. What is History? In this lesson, students will use Flocabulary's Week in Rap, Year in Rap, 18 Years in Rap and a history unit on the French Revolution to examine a key question: What is history? Implementation Suggestions Week in Rap Fridays Every Thursday night, we post the latest Week in Rap video and email all Flocabulary subscribers to let them know it's up. Preview the video and prepare for discussion on "Flocab Friday" (or "Flocab Monday" of the next week). Use the Flocab lesson sequence for this weekly Flocab event. Enter The Week in Rap Shout-Out Contest Ever wonder how schools are chosen for shout outs at the start of The Week in Rap? Each week, there's a contest your students can enter. Week in Rap shout out contests ask students to reflect on the news with writing, math and art. Make a contest entry a regular assignment or ongoing extra credit and maybe you'll earn your school a shout out, too. See the current contest here . Jigsaw the Interactive Lyrics Divide the interactive lyrics amongst your students. Click here for a printable worksheet to guide your students' mini research projects that they can share with each other. Dive Deeper with The Week in Rap Exercise Sequence With The Week in Rap exercise sequence , students can demonstrate their understanding of the news while building critical thinking, reading, writing, geography, science and math skills. Read more here. Connect The Week in Rap to Social Studies Elections in Egypt? Watch the Ancient Egypt video to review the geography. Important Supreme Court ruling? Revisit the three branches of government. Use Flocabulary's social studies videos to connect history to current events. Connect The Week in Rap to English Language Arts Because the news is always changing, current events always provides new nonfiction texts for students to read and write about. Whether you're teaching main idea , commas or source evaluation , The Week in Rap has relevant materials you need. Help Students Process Tragedy in the News Presenting news to students about tragic events in the world, including acts of terrorism and hate crimes, can be especially challenging. On the Flocabulary blog, three experts in child psychology and mental health share their advice for building healthy, safe and supportive environments. We also offer suggestions for using art for expression in the classroom in the wake of tragic events. Read more about helping students process tragedy here. Week in Rap Throughout the Week If you use The Week in Rap regularly, you may find that students are naturally following the news throughout the week. Let their curiosity spark an ongoing current events assignment. Have students read a news source each day, or pick a story from the previous Week in Rap to follow. Ask a few students to give updates. The Week in Rap in Homeroom or Over the Announcements Use your homeroom or advisory period to watch and discuss The Week in Rap. Some schools will even play The Week in Rap as part of the morning announcements. Special Week in Rap Videos Twice a year, The Week in Rap reports on more than the previous 7 days. Each December, look out for The Year in Rap, where we summarize the top stories from the past year. In May, to celebrate high school graduates, 18 Years in Rap summarizes the top news stories of the last 18 years. Guess the News Story Before you watch the video, have students write down a quick summary of the news stories that they think will be included in The Week in Rap. Whoever guesses the most is the winner! Bears Athletics Moscow High School Calendar of Events Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Saturday, September 21 Girls c volleyball. Tri-Match vs Post Falls and Gonzaga Prep (A) 9:00 AM vs Post Falls High School Boys Varsity Soccer (H) 11:00 AM vs Lakeland High School Boys JV Soccer Girls varsity soccer. (A) 12:00 PM vs Lakeland High School Coed Varsity Swim Asotin Family Aquatic Center (A) 12:10 PM vs Clarkston High School Girls Varsity Volleyball (A) 1:30 PM vs Post Falls High School Girls JV Volleyball Administrator Login Sign up for Alerts Moscow High School 402 East Fifth Street Moscow, ID 83843 892-1109 Privacy Policy End User Agreement The official website of Moscow High School Bears Athletics 344 IMAGES Current Events Assignment (High School) by Kate Broughton Current Events Worksheet for Middle & High School Current Event Worksheet High School High School Current Events Worksheet by Jordan Levitz Current Event Templates & Assignment for Middle & High School Current Events Weekly Assignment Guide VIDEO 50 Creative Assignments For Any Novel Or Short Story Current Event Assignment Students, parents take part in protest over changes at HISD high school VIDEO: High schoolers head to NYC for college fair Current Events Assignment week 6 VIDEO: A new twist to a high school tradition COMMENTS PBS Newshour Classroom Current events ready to go for students grades 6-12! Lessons based on the PBS NewsHour with focus on civics, social studies, ELA, science, art, and media literacy. 7 Free Current Events Websites for Students If you don't want to recreate the wheel, you can add diversity to your current event assignments with these printable AND digital standards-aligned templates. Each current event worksheet focuses on a different reading comprehension skill including main idea & details, text connections, vocabulary in context, fact vs. opinion, and summarizing ... Current Events in the Classroom Engaging with current events is an essential part of educating young people to be informed and humane participants in society, helping them develop the capacity to examine issues from multiple perspectives and think critically about the world around them. Our current events collection includes strategies for addressing current events with your ... Teach Current Events With These Free Worksheets From Introducing current events in the classroom can promote critical thinking, empathy, reading skills, global awareness, and so much more. Whether you're assigning weekly current events summaries or conducting a single lesson, our free current events worksheets for grades 3-8 are the perfect companion. Inside, you'll find two options for ... PDF Teaching Current Events by The Week Junior The Week Junior is a kid-friendly current events magazine that features sections on trending news, new books and movies, sports and culture, recipes and craft projects, and so much more. There's something for every kid. The Week Junior is committed to publishing trustworthy, accurate, and unbiased content to enable students to form and ... Current Events A weekly collection of lesson plans, writing prompts and activities from The Learning Network, a site that helps educators and students teach and learn with The New York Times. Resources for ... Student News Daily About Student News Daily. We are a non-profit current events website for high school students. Our goal is to build students' knowledge of current events and strengthen their critical thinking skills. Learn More. Current events articles for teachers and students — Make sense of current events with free online resources for teachers. Seven Ways to Bring Current Events Into the Classroom The current events journal is a too-common assignment in middle school and high school where students must write short summaries of news, following a particular format. current events PBS NewsHour stories for Dec. 15, 2022. Current events for social studies, science, English, STEM and more with discussion questions for grades 6-12. Daily News Lesson September 23 2022. 50 Ways to Teach With Current Events Just like most other things in life, the best way to do all that is through practice. In honor of National News Engagement Day, here are 50 ideas to help teachers bring current events into the classroom, grouped below by category: Reading and Writing. Speaking and Listening. Games and Quizzes. Photographs, Illustrations, Videos and Infographics. Free Current Events Lesson Plans & Resources Share My Lesson provides free Current Events lesson plans and teacher resources. Find creative ways to get students excited about learning. ... (Grades 3-5) Middle School High School. tntl. How Life in Springfield Has Been Disrupted by Lies About Its Haitian Community. September 18, 2024. Read More. tntl. Do Celebrity Endorsements Matter in ... Current Events Toolkit About This Toolkit. Our current events toolkit offers tools and strategies to help teachers organize discussions on current events in their classrooms. We recommend that teachers who are just getting started addressing current events with their students—or who are looking to learn new strategies for engaging students in discussions about the ... Current Events Rubric High School Teaching Resources This project-assignment is perfect for any high school Socials or English classes, where students need to seek out, select, read, reflect, and present a news story that is important to them, sharing it with the class and leading a brief class discussion. In doing so, students take ownership over their own learning. I have also found this a great way for students develop civics by engaging in ... Twenty-Five Great Ideas for Teaching Current Events uses class time wisely. arrives on time for school (and/or class) every day. is well-prepared for class each day. works at an appropriate pace, neither too quickly or slowly. completes assignments in the time allotted. paces work on long-term assignments. sets achievable goals with respect to time. completes make-up work in a timely fashion. Teaching About Current Events In addition, the site is planning to release new teaching ideas and current event resources in mid-August, tailored for this upcoming school year! Teaching with Current Events: The Bill of Rights Institute provides many current events resources that fall into various categories, including gun rights, federalism, criminal procedure & due process ... Breaking News, Latest News and Videos View the latest news and breaking news today for U.S., world, weather, entertainment, politics and health at CNN.com. Current Events Subject Guide Let their curiosity spark an ongoing current events assignment. Have students read a news source each day, or pick a story from the previous Week in Rap to follow. ... where we summarize the top stories from the past year. In May, to celebrate high school graduates, 18 Years in Rap summarizes the top news stories of the last 18 years. Guess the ... Moscow High School in Moscow, ID View Full Report Card. Moscow High School is a highly rated, public school located in MOSCOW, ID. It has 769 students in grades 9-12 with a student-teacher ratio of 17 to 1. According to state test scores, 47% of students are at least proficient in math and 82% in reading. Moscow High School in Moscow Township, KS Data Sources. Moscow High School is a public school located in MOSCOW, KS. It has 80 students in grades 6-12 with a student-teacher ratio of 9 to 1. According to state test scores, 15% of students are at least proficient in math and 25% in reading. Moscow High School Calendar of Events Moscow High School . Calendar of Events. Today. Day 5 Day Month. Key: Home Away Practice School Other Scrimmage Postponed Cancelled. S un: M on: T ue: W ed: T hu: F ri: S at: Wednesday, September 18 Games. Non-Games. BEARS ATHLETICS. Home; Administrator Login; Sign up for Alerts; Contact Us; Advertise; SCHOOL INFO. Moscow High School 402 East ... assignment homework phd report resume review speech thesis