Especially for Teachers

Bright Ideas Lesson Plans

Getting the Message

This is our first year with our local News-Journal newspaper.

We have one student who faithfully "delivers" the papers to our desks each day as his classroom job. He is very proud to help out, and will make a great paperboy one day. He even makes sure we recycle them when we are done too!

We use our paper as a social skills lesson each day: how to get along with each other.

We use two to three newspaper articles daily, selected by me, as some topic editing is required. Our class begins an article discussion before our social skills time. We look at each section: National, Local, and either Sports or Accent to find one from each. The photos usually catch our attention first and we have a great time sharing thoughts. For National and Local we discuss things like "Is it a safe or fair law?" and "Do you think the grown-ups decided the right way?" and how or why people feel this way, or acted that way, about the issues in our news. We always talk about good sportsmanship, and playing fair in the sports section. I do try to keep us on the positive articles for the most part, and we do have some really good discussions that come from this.

One discussion was on the recent article with the real/toy gun article/photo. We discussed all the angles: How would you feel if you were the parents of the other kids, if you were the kid, if you were the policeman, if you were the mom, if you were the doctor, if you were the other kids in school, if you were a teacher, and we ended the discussion with - that´s why schools/we/I have the rule "We don´t even play guns in school." We discussed again - Why do we have rules? - for safety. They really got the message. We are keeping it real and true to life.

Susan Benson
2nd,3rd Grade ESE
Westside Elementary

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