Things I like about it:
1) Each show is produced with the Common Core and other national disciplinary standards in mind. This, plus the two sentence summary on the home page, allows you to preload concepts and vocabulary. It also means you can say, "today we're going to hear about Ukraine. What did we learn about Ukraine and Russia yesterday?" or "How does the current conflict in Ukraine relate to the Cold War and the Soviet Union?"
2) Each week CNN puts together comprehension questions. These can help you gauge what they're gaining from the show, give you some idea of how well they understand the world around them, and maybe, help you find out what is interesting to them. Which brings me to my next point...
3) Any current event can be connected (or paralleled) to historical events, economic theories, physical geography, scientific discoveries, and the like. CNN Student News can give you inspiration and ideas! Are your students curious about the measles outbreak? Use it to teach students about the immune system, the scientific method, or historic pandemics. Are the students asking questions about the events in Ferguson? It can be tied to every amendment in the Bill of Rights or open a difficult, but important conversation about race in the United States.
4) The entire show is put together with students in mind. The host is upbeat, but doesn't downplay the gravity of serious situations. Each country on the show is shown on a globe and difficult concepts are explained in detail. This isn't a new label on the same, old news. The show is really made for students.
However you use it, you will find your students making connecting classroom concepts to CNN Student News, and vice versa.
CNN Student News is great and it is a wonderful way to develop the habit of watching the news, and also teach students critical thinking skills. However, knowing how to read non-fiction text, like news articles, is also important.
Thankfully, there's a great newspaper-ish website for students.
NewsELA is a great option for exploring current events through text. NewsELA borrows articles from major newspapers around the country and then rewrites the articles at different Lexile levels. They also provide text-dependent quizzes and writing prompts related to the articles.
It's very convenient to save the document as a PDF and share it via Edmodo. This makes it easy to distribute and allows students more colors and tools for close reading. It also means they can take screen shots of important passages. If they encounter a word they don't know, like "inaugural," it's easy to find a picture or definition and paste it into the article.
As I mentioned earlier, many articles come with a quiz at the end. It's very easy to remove the answer page, but I think it is better to leave the answers attached. Successful readers don't know all the answers. They know how to learn anything and why they know what they do. Students need to find, highlight and label the paragraph which gave them the answer. This builds skills and reinforces the mindset that all answers are there, it's just a matter of finding them or figuring them out through inference.
As with CNN Student News, NewsELA is a way to explore why last centuries events are still relevant today. Why do the Scots want independence? How does their independence movement compare to the American Revolution?
Current events develop habits of good citizenship, like critical thinking and being informed. It allows students to connect the past to the present and the here to the there. When they know what is going on in the world, they will want to know why and that is what good education is all about!
If you are interested in putting more current events in the classroom, be sure to check out Fantasy Geopolitics! There are lots of resources there! My blog post on it is here!
If you are interested in putting more current events in the classroom, be sure to check out Fantasy Geopolitics! There are lots of resources there! My blog post on it is here!
