Current events in the classroom

Are you like me and don’t watch the news? I don’t watch the news because it’s depressing. But it’s also not a good thing because sometimes I don’t know what’s going on in the world.I wish growing up in school that I had learned an appreciation for learning what’s going on in the world around me. I didn’t really start to desire that until I started traveling.

I have a great idea for getting your students engaged in learning about current events, in your neck of the woods, in your country, or even in other countries.

Engage and challenge your students in current events by using choice boards with differentiated activities

Have you ever used choice boards? I LOVE LOVE LOVE using choice boards in the classroom. Did I mention that I love them? Here are my top ten reasons for loving choice boards:

Top Ten reasons to ❤ choice boards!
1. Students love to be able to make choices in their learning
2. Allow for differentiation
3. Allow for student choice
4. Students can choose according to their multiple intelligence
5. You can have the students do as little or as many as you want
6. You can enforce that students do one or two activities in particular if you choose
7. You can also differentiate among your students how many each activities to complete
8. You can choose to assign them as homework or classwork
9. Students love to be able to choose how they show you what they know
10. Students love them!

With my current events choice board, you can have your students look for a current event either on the internet or the newspaper, and they choose 1 activity to do from the given 9 activities on the board. Scholastic News would be a great resource as well.

If you have a student who loves to draw, then they could choose to do a comic strip.
If you have a student who loves to write, then they could choose to do the diary entries.

One tip I do have is to show them an example of what to expect. You could create an example beforehand or have one of your higher students or GT students do one of the activities as an example before you introduce it to the class. That way you won’t have students completing an activity in 10 minutes.

To save paper you could make a class set and then either laminate them or have the students keep them in a sheet protector to use week after week.