3 Sites to Help You Use Current Events as Classroom Resources

A common theme runs through several of the blogs I read this evening: teaching with current events. Nowadays using current events to help teach is not limited to social studies. See for yourself!

Winston Retrieves the News / S. Carter / CC BY-SA 2.0

Word problems. Story prompts. Creativity triggers. Data.


Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) shares two BBC News Magazine Monitor weekly features in his blog this week. The Week in Pictures and The Week in Numbers both feature interesting photos. The Week in Pictures provides a brief description that gives you enough information to help you find more information about the news story. The Week in Numbers gives a statistic and a link to the story that the photos illustrate.

Byrne discusses the value of these weekly features to interest students in the news articles. I agree. And I would add that they are rich resources for word problems in mathematics, story prompts for writing, triggers for creative multimedia stories, and data for problem solving.

Both teachers and students could use these interesting photos, statistics, and the related stories to help share ideas, investigate topics, and support viewpoints.

The Learning Network provides teaching materials for content in the New York Times. They publish lesson plans for NY Times stories for each subject at the end of the school year. See their roundup for 2013-2014 for social studies, history, geography, and civics.

To emphasize the locations of current events you might want to check the site that Larry Ferlazzo describes in his blog this week. Breaking News allows you to find stories about a topic you choose. You can then navigate to the story… and to a map that shows the location of the story.