Keeping your kids updated about Current Events is an integral part of their education. Help develop the habit of regularly checking on current issues among kids early on. Hence, it must be inculcated both at home and at school.
Schools can include it as a part of their Civics (Government) or History curriculum. At home, kids must be motivated to develop the daily habit of reading newspapers and watching local news reports on TV.
The aims and benefits of Current Events culture among kids are:
- Development of their critical abilities, power of analysis and opinion building. Encourage them to analyze newspaper articles and news reports by comparing and contrasting the content and presentation of various media reports.
- Helps identify key words and concepts in articles on Current Events.
- Enriches vocabulary of kids.
Great ways of making kids’ analyze Current Events
- Turn it into a routine activity either every weekend or a particular day of the week when the homework load is less.
- Make newspaper cuttings of recent articles and set questionnaires including who?, what?, why?, when? and implications?.
- Another way is to make kids rewrite the article from their own angle.
- Students must compare coverage of a news story in various media.
- Making cartoons with current news topics is also an enjoyable process.
- Senior students can start practicing editorial writing, letters to the editor and letters to elected representatives of their area.
- The activities must be varied regularly so that there is no sense of boredom.
Some of the newspapers and Internet resources for such Current Events lessons are:
- ABC News 4 Kids.
- Children’s Express WorldWide (CE) CNNfyi.com
- Vanderbilt Television News Archive
- Newspapers in Education (NIE Online).
- New York Times Learning Network
- Scholastic News Zone
- School Zone
- Star Tribune Online Idea
- Student Newspaper Project
- Teaching Units from the Calgary (Canada) Herald.
- TIME for Kids
- Time 100
- Twenty-Five Great Ideas for Teaching Current Events
- U.S. News Online
- Vocal Point
- Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition
- Weekly Reader Galaxy
Some TV-based sources are:
- A&E Television Programs
- Africans in America (PBS)
- Cable in the Classroom Online is a cable program
- Clinton Years on ABC News Nightline and PBS’s Frontline
- CNN Lesson Plans and Multimedia Resources.
- C-Span broadcast’s Lesson Plans and Teaching Ideas.
- Discovery Channel and Discovery Channel School
- Media Watch by The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)
- Nova Online Teacher’s Guide Library
- Online News Hour of PBS
Select from these Current Events resources and give your kids a variety of options.