What's Important About Current Events

 

Current events are a very interesting way to teach the five W's to your students.  The five W's are: Who, Where, What, When, and Why.  As small groups we created a activity to teach with current events.  Kristine and I used the website Newsela.  Newsela is a website that house current event articles.  Each article can be set to a certain reading level, students can take notes on the site, and teachers can create essays and quizzes.  For our presentation we decided to teach the five W's, how to take notes and how to find a main topic.  After, teaching the five W's we moved on to teach how to write in short hand to take knows. Some of the short hand we taught shorting of words like with-w/, without-w/o, very-v., and because-b/c.  Then, we gave the students the links to the articles and a graphic organizer to help them take their notes.  The graphic organizer was broken up into the five W's.  The students were to read the articles and fill out the five W's graphic organizer.  At the end, when the graphic organizer was filled out the students where asked to find what main idea the three articles shared.  The three articles where: "Platform for Action" provides a road map to gender equality, Boxing's old-school rules, a teen girl says, must catch up with the times, and Study says young women narrowing the wag gap at work.  Using current events is very important to teaching social studies.  The need to know what is going on in the world around us is an essential part of social studies.  I had a great time exploring Newsela and the functions that teachers and students have at the disposal.