Current Events in the Classroom

Current events are a great tool for a social studies teacher to use in his/her classroom. Current events show us what is going on in the world around us, which is a very important aspect of social studies. Teachers hope that their students are up to date with the happenings in the world, but they cannot be sure. Assigning current event projects to students ensures that students are aware of what's happening in the world. Current events should be used in all classrooms, but especially social studies ones. There are a ton of great ways that you can use current events in an elementary school classroom. There are fun websites like Flocabulary, which produces a weekly news rap that talks about the week's events. These are short, entertaining, and easy for students to pay attention to. There are plenty of ways to teach Social Studies though, which made it difficult for me when I had to pick one to use in front of my class!

For my current events project for class, I chose an article about economics. This is because when I go to do fieldwork with my class later this semester, that is what we will be teaching about to second graders, and I wanted to become more familiar with it. My article (attached here) is titled "The Three Great Thinkers Who Changed Economics" and is written by Daniel Adler. I got this article from Newsela, which is a great website for current events. Check it out sometime! Other websites to check out for current events are CommLit, Readworks and Tween Tribune. I chose my article not only because it's about economics but also because it fits the format of the Five W's, and that is my strategy for teaching this current event to my class. The Five W's are who, where, what, why and when. Students can use these W's when reading, writing or while listening. I think that this strategy works very well with elementary schoolers because it's easy to remember and really helps them organize their writing or thoughts or even their notes. So, for my assignment for the class, I split everyone up into three groups. I then had each group fill out a Five W's chart about one specific economist mentioned in the article. Then, I had one representative of each group present their findings to me, and we made a big Five W's chart for the whole class about the three economists we studied. This showed the organizational power of the Five W's chart and proved its effectiveness. I think that this is a great way to break down any current event article with students and give them organized notes about the article to end up with.
Overall, this was a fun, not too difficult project. I learned about a lot of new websites to find current events to give to students, and I also got experience designing a mini-lesson based on current events. This was a valuable experience and I'm glad I went through it. If you want to check out the powerpoint that I used to go along with my lesson, check it out here!