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Teaching Current Events

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Teaching current events is essential! Students need to be aware of what is happening in the world! They need to start learning how to analyze news critically without being biased.

Honestly, what I wanted the most when I started teaching current events was to give my ELA lessons a twist and help my students develop thinking skills. I did not know how to tackle this at first, But as soon as I started, I got motivated and so did my students! “Yes, Wednesday of Current Events!”, they would exclaim.

And that is how I started building resources. I tried them and made corrections to them; then, I re used them, as they work with any news article.

Below, you will find a list of activities that you can use while teaching current events

Activities for Current Events

  1. Analyzing editorial cartoons: Have students choose an editorial cartoon and analyze it deeply. You can give them a guide with questions to help them work and develop their thinking skills.
  2. One pager: Have students choose a current event newsarticle and analyze it in detail. In order to achieve that, they will be given a template, detailed instructions and a rubric. You can check this resource which also contains a checklist to evaluate students’ analysis and production. If you want to know more about using one-pagers in class, you can read more here.
  3. 10 simple activities to use with any newsarticle: Have students choose among these 10 different activities and work on a news article (or assign them the task you like)
    • Creating a game
    • Today in history
    • 3-5 minute video
    • Adding speech bubbles to a photograph
    • Working on the 5 Ws
    • Summarizing an article
    • Creating an infographic
    • Creating a poem or song
    • Interviewing someone
    • Creating an ad campaigning for or against a debatable topic.

All the above mentioned activities can be used several times as they will have different results according to the news article chosen! My students really enjoyed these tasks (of course, some more than others!) and became more aware of what is happening in our country and in the world nowadays! I hope you find them useful and engaging!

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