Does anyone have a good current events assignment that they give to middle school students? With the new push for more rigorous work it seems like what I used to have is too babyish. Just wanted to see what other people used.
I have not ever done this kind of assignment, so I have no helpful input. However, if I am still teaching Environmental Science, then I am considering adding this in. I am very curious to see what others who have done it say.
What are you doing right now? I utilize debate and discussion extensively with current events. It might also be great to create somewhat of a modified DBQ that allows students to consider different sides of a controversial issue.
I haven;t started work yet. I'll be teaching ancient history. I just want to give a generic kind of assignment that can go with any topic. This way the kids can keep the directions in their notebooks and refer to it when they need to do current events. My AP wants it at least 2 times a month.
I teach my students how to write and present Curent Events at the start of each year as mini-unit. I currently teach middle school Social Studies and Current Events are part of my district's Social Studies curriculum. The basics are that they have to find a news article either at an online news source on in a newspaper/magazine and summarize the article in 2 to 4 paragraphs. They key is that they learn the difference between summarizing and "story retelling." The student can choose any news topic that interests them (crime, sports, entertainment, politics, business, education) but it must be a full article - no obituaries, recipies, book/movie/cd reviews, etc. I tell students ahead of time to choose an article they can actually read and understand and that they should look up all of the vocabulary words/terms in their article that they do not know. Every Friday, students have to present their written Current Event to the class. This entails them bringing their news article into class (or they lose major points), reading their 2 to 4 paragraph summary and then answering questions from me about their article. As they read their written Current Event, I scan their article for questions to ask; I always ask questions to check to see if the student actually read and comprehended the article. Also, I scan for difficult vocabulary terms and ask about these. The key to this working is laying the groundwork and showing the kids step-by-step what you expect - or it just becomes a mess. Some years I am lazy about teaching Current Events and then I never get anything worthwhile from my students.
Last year...Current events seemed to finally "work" how I wanted it to work! Each student needed to sign up for one day a month.... I did it on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I would have about 3-5 kids each of those days. They chose the "type" of current event (had to do one from each type through the year before repeating. i.e. No doing a sports story every month...) They also chose the kind of presentation: PowerPoint, poster, skit or newscast. Powerpoint was the most popular. They seemed to enjoy it and learn about our world, AND presentation skills improved too! I liked it because it wasn't a heavy writing assignment, so everyone could be successful - even my kids with writing IEPs. My favorite part was the questions and comments after each presentation. So thoughtful.
I'm planning on doing it this year. Since its 8th grade, I am expecting them to be able to not only find and summarize current science news, but evaluate the news as a source, and determine how reliable and how scientific it is. I think I will also have them try to find the publication information of the original research paper if it is available. As for how I'm planning on implementing it, I haven't really thought that far yet. I will probably go over research techniques all together in a computer lab, and then have one current event assignment due per quarter.
