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The A Section — It´s not just for current events any more!

The A SECTION gives the most important news of the day at the state, national, and international levels. A fast-breaking local news story may be in this section as well. Social studies teachers use this section to teach geographical concepts and history as it happens. Language arts teachers model newspaper writing to improve students´ writing skills, to show comprehension of events, to insure clarity and accuracy in reporting, and to link with literary works. It also features the EDITORIAL PAGE with a multitude of opportunities to teach your students critical thinking skills such as differentiating between fact and opinion, understanding bias, problem-solving, and decision-making. Editorials, columns, and cartoons provide essential insight into the newspaper´s philosophy and purpose. The WEATHER section appears on the last page of the local section and offers a wealth of science, geography, and math opportunities for teachers.

The News-Journal also features a BUSINESS SECTION daily. For teachers of mathematics, social studies, economics, and participants in the Florida Stock Market Game, this section is invaluable. It covers international, national and local business news and trends as well as stock and bond market listings.

The LOCAL SECTION includes news and feature stories of interest to readers in Volusia and Flagler counties. You can use articles in this section for a variety of skill-related and valuing activities. In the strategy Hall of Fame/Hall of Shame, students identify reasons to nominate persons and events for the appropriate hall; this process helps them learn to analyze and classify behaviors and issues based on facts, perceptions, and bias, and to accept differing outlooks and opinions.

The daily COMICS SECTION can be used to teach many vital reading, writing and thinking skills from sequencing of events and classifying comics by type through understanding and identifying bias. Students enjoy such activities as re-writing the "balloons" which indicate speech or thoughts and creating their own comics. Converting comics to narrative writing gives students excellent practice in selecting vivid verbs and adverbs and punctuating dialogue. Developing their own comics is a catalyst for creative and artistic talent development.

The ACCENT SECTION features people, places, trends and entertainment to suit the varied interests and lifestyles of readers. Tuesday´s Mini-Page is very popular with all ages. This section is especially useful in teaching essay writing, since students enjoy writing "feature stories" and movie and TV reviews modeled after ACCENT articles. Your students may want to read a letter to Dear Abby and write their own answer to a problem. Display and classified advertisements become a real-world textbook for students as they learn about budgets and expenditures, comparison shopping, and bargain hunting.

The SPORTS SECTION includes the latest scores and stories from the world of sports and is a teacher´s dream come true, since high interest leads to involvement. An incredible variety of mathematics activities using sports information includes graphing individual and/or team sports scores and averaging, estimating and predicting scores and records. Tracking on a map the trips taken by favorite teams and discovering why team names were selected are other academic pluses for the sports section.

On Friday, The NEWS-JOURNAL features GO-DO, a section which provides readers with information on where to go and what to do in Volusia and Flagler counties. Movie listings, restaurants ads, the calendar of events - are all here. All give teachers exciting possibilities in mathematics such as planning a night out and budgeting for entertainment, classifying activities by type of appeal and graphing the results, and using the display ads to compute costs.

CLASSIFIEDS and DISPLAY ADS provide opportunities for students to analyze data about jobs, homes, articles for sale and needs and wants of readers. Using these advertisements can make the point about STAYING IN SCHOOL better than a lecture. Students are always amazed when they realize how much money it will take to make even a decent living when the cost of housing, food, utilities, transportation, etc., is considered.

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