Currently...

As I mentioned in my last entry, I am a big fan of geography and current events.  This year my son won his school's National Geographic Geography Bee and a few weeks ago we traveled up to Farmington, ME so he could participate in the Maine State Geography Bee.  As a 6th grader, he was up against some AMAZING 7th and 8th graders, and really held his own.  In the end, the two questions that tripped him up were current event questions.  He had no idea about the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, or anything about the recent, annual European Nuclear Power conference that took place in Brussels, Belgium.  I am now on a mission to make sure that he is more exposed to current events, which has me thinking about how to do so in the classroom as well.

I've been talking to the Social Studies teacher on my 5th/6th grade team, and he agrees that it is an area that he needs to focus on as well.  The struggle seems to be finding appropriate sources, but once you do it seems like the possibilities would be endless.  Just skimming through a recent copy of Scholastic's current event magazine, Junior Scholastic (http://junior.scholastic.com/), I was excited to see so many Math and Science topics that could be covered as well.  For instance, almost every page had some sort of graph, table, or some sort of statistic or percentage.   The only problem with the Scholastic magazine is that it costs money... I've begun by searching for internet sources that are geared towards 5th and 6th grade students, but I keep getting caught up in the details of how I would have the students chose their articles.  It seems like there would be already too many choices in just one source, but to have 5 or 6 sources to chose from... Any suggestions?

Here are a few of the sources I have found:

NY Times blog about using current events in the classroom.

Press Corps: Scholastic Magazine online current events magazine

Youngzine: news and more for the young.

PBS News Hour Extra: for students and teachers

And this blog post from Middleweb.com that focuses on the "Future of History" and how to teach current events to middle schoolers:

Future of History

With the help of the Social Studies teacher, I plan on creating some graphic organizers specifically for summarizing current event articles.  Deciding how much classroom time can/should be dedicated will be important as well.  Coordinating the technology needs if we are only able to use web based sources, will also be tricky.