Especially for Teachers

Bright Ideas Lesson Plans

Nightly News Write-Up

From inter-city Daytona, these children see more than the usual amount of rawness of life: one child´s sister was shot and killed by another brother a couple of months ago; another writes daily "letters" to a mother he has not seen in a couple of years, for her addiction has skewed her priorities : such a list goes on! It would be easy, even expected, that these students be bogged down with their pressing personal concerns.

However, it is with the newspaper efforts that these children can get up, and get over their current crisis, and focus on their "world citizenship"--their world is wider than the world has been for any generation yet. They speak of their keypals in Australia, Israel, and other places around the world, as other children speak of their friends on the next block; they teach "hip-hop" English---kiddie slang---to the youth in a kibbutz outside Jerusalem, who are learning standard English as a second language, finding it hard: the project lightened as they, for example, decipher, "Yo, man! Don´t be dis-ing my talk." They can ask their special friend, Colin Powell, if a report card is worthy of pride---and he responds! Or, ask their law ethics professor friend at Pepperdine about the status of the fires near his home, and his reply references a classic bit of literature, that send them researching.

In the past week, they wrote what they thought the president would include in his State of the Union Address, and only missed Social Security, and terrorism, among those topics. Today, there was consideration of how the tourists coming to Daytona impact each one of them economically, and this blossomed out into the measures the United States has taken to ensure that we will never have another Great Depression, and the woes Japan is experiencing without such safeguards in place, and how this may be the basis of the sale of Circuit City has been running since January 1st.

We are also quite fond of the Mini Pages, cutting them out, mounting them on colored paper, and laminating, so they can be done with dry erase pens, and then redone.

As we tried to orient the students new this year to how things were to go in the classroom, Nick said, "Let me just tell you: there´s something you ought to know; we´ve won the bright ides contest from the News Journal two years in a row, and we plan to make it three. You have to read the papers they send us, and write up at least one article every night, like ´who´ did ´what´ ´when´ where´-and the one that´s hard, ´why´. You´ll learn about people, and places all over the world-everybody doesn´t do things like we do. They don´t have room for all of us the night they talk about the winners, so we have our own celebration the next day. We´re not babies any more, and there´s a lot of stuff we´ve got to know."

Right, Nick! And we do, indeed, "Read all about it!", and that gives students an emphatic, "EXTRA, EXTRA".

P.A. Arnold
Hurst

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