When I was a student in Mrs. Simmons’s second grade classroom one of the things that I looked forward to every week was the arrival of the Scholastic Weekly Reader. I loved read the stories about news from other parts of the world (I guess I was destined to become a social studies teacher). Today, students don’t have to wait for the Scholastic Weekly Reader to appear in their teacher’s mailbox. Here are five student-friendly news sites to use in your current events lesson plans.
Go Go News is a news
website designed for elementary school students. The site features many
short news stories that can be read and listened to. The stories that Go
Go News covers aren’t hard, breaking news stories. The stories are more
of a interesting and educational nature.
Teaching Kids News
is a news site developed for use in elementary school and middle school
classrooms. Teaching Kids News features timely and relevant news
stories written on a level that students can comprehend. Each article is
accompanied by a set of discussion questions, writing prompts, reading
prompts, and vocabulary words.
Youngzine is an online source of
news, sports, and entertainment stories for elementary school students.
Students will find stories to read and videos to watch in each of the
information categories. Each news story is accompanied by a Google Map
that has a placemark indicating where the story takes place.
CNN Student News is an excellent resource for middle school and high school current events lessons. The roughly ten minute episodes feature US
stories, a world news stories, a “shout out” to a classroom, and a quick
quiz. Transcripts for each show are available for download as are
suggested viewing questions to cover with your students.
One of my favorite features on the BBC New website is the Day in the Day in Pictures. The
Day in Pictures displays a small collection of photographs from around
the world. The pictures capture a mix of serious news stories and
lighter cultural stories. The Day in Pictures collections are part of a much larger resource from the BBC simply called In Pictures.
The In Pictures resource provides hundreds of images in a variety
collections and slideshows about current events throughout the world.
Some of the slide shows even include narration. All of the images
include captions explaining what is happening in the picture and a
little background knowledge about the event being photographed.
