Social Studies

• Hone geography skills by locating the cities and countries mentioned in news stories on a map, globe, or online atlas. The location's distance from the classroom can also be calculated, in miles or kilometers.
  
• To enhance understanding of the grouping of news stories by geographic region, have students bring in news stories that belong to the following categories: Local/State or Region/National/International. Stories from the same category can be grouped together and their locations pinpointed on a map.
  
• Relate your classroom study of history to the news. If your class is studying about a particular region's history, have your students find current news stories that emanate from that present-day location (keep in mind that country and city names may have changed). For example, if your class is studying ancient Mesopotamia, lead them to understand that this geographic location correlates to modern-day Iraq.
  
• Conversely, link locations with which your students are familiar to news stories from the past. If your class takes a field trip to Boston, ask them to use the library and the Internet to research historic news stories relating the events that took place in Boston on  December 16, 1773 (the date of the Boston Tea Party).
  
• Have your class create a news broadcast, Web-based news report, or print news story relating the details of a particular historic event as it might been reported in the news.
  
• Use an international news story as a stepping-off point for investigating the culture, language, traditions and cuisines of a foreign country or region.

English/ Language Arts

• Use print news stories to develop vocabulary lists for your class.
  
• Distribute pictures and images from newspapers, newsmagazines, and Internet news sites to your students. Have the students write stories or monologues about what the people pictured are thinking, feeling, and doing.
  
• Have all the students in a class or grade develop a newspaper. Students can research and write news stories pertaining to school and local news, and the paper can also feature sports sections, advice columns, a weather report, etc.
  
• Separate the headlines from news stories pulled from print sources and the Internet. Scramble the headlines and the stories and have the students match the correct headlines to the correct stories.
  
• Cut the headlines off of a variety of news stories. Distribute them to your students and have them improvise and write news stories that might be associated with the headlines. It can be a fun creative-writing exercise to use tabloid-style headlines for this activity.
  
• Students can practice their reading comprehension and listening comprehension skills by reading news articles and/or watching televised news broadcasts and outlining the "5 W's and an H" in each report. The "5 W's and an H" – Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? – are considered the essential elements of news reporting.
  
• To hone narrative and sequencing skills, cut up news stories (by paragraph) or comic strips (by illustrated square), scramble them, and have students arrange them into the correct order.

Science

• Relate news and current events stories to the weather. For example, when reading about Baghdad, find the temperature and precipitation predicted there today.
  
• Use the weather section to find the temperature extremes in the United States on a daily or weekly basis. Which city is hottest today? Which is coldest? Tie this to geography by marking the locations on a map.
  
• The weather section is rife with data that can be used to track patterns in nature. Have students track and chart the phases of the moon, sunrise and sunset times, the tides, etc. They can chart these on graphs or mark them on calendars to learn about cyclical daily and seasonal patterns.
  
• Reading a weather map takes skill and practice. Using the newspaper or news broadcast, students can learn about symbols and abbreviations used to describe and map weather. Eventually, the students can make their own weather maps by reading textual weather forecasts and placing weather symbols and abbreviations on a blank map.
  
• Unusual weather phenomena are often reported in the news, with extreme weather stories often making it to the headlines. Use these weather-related news stories as jumping-off points for students' exploration of the causes of extreme weather phenomena. Research can be conducted in the library and using Internet resources.
  
• Use news stories to identify scientists and scientific careers. Make a bulletin board of science careers by listing the names and professions of scientists interviewed in news stories. Invite local scientists mentioned in the news to your classroom to discuss their work and to explain the path that led them to their careers.
  
• For a lesson on health and nutrition, cut out or print recipes found in the Food section of the newspaper or on news sites. Have students sort the ingredients in a recipe into the major food groups as determined by the Food and Drug Administration.

Mathematics

• The facts, figures, and statistics in the news offer ample opportunity for creating graphs and charts to track various real-world trends. Examples of trends to graph include: your city's high and low temperatures over a two-week period; average daily wind speed; amount of daily precipitation; the topic of the headline story; the number of stories on the front page dealing with local, state, national, and international news; the team statistics of a local sports team; and the performance of a particular stock over time.
  
• Make math problems relevant to the real world by using the facts and figures in a current news story to develop word problems for your students.
  
• Using globes, maps, and printed or online atlases, calculate the distance from home to the locations of stories in the news. Take this activity a step farther by calculating how long it would take to fly or drive from to these destinations from your hometown.
  
• Prices and figures mentioned in the classified ads can be used to calculate averages. For example, what is the average selling price of a 2000 Honda Civic? What about the average rental price of a one-bedroom apartment in a particular neighborhood?
  
• Assign your students money-related scavenger hunts using a page or two of the Classifieds. For example, tell them you want to buy: a guitar, sofa, and a 2002 Ford Explorer. What is the least amount of money you will need? Alternatively, tell the students that they have a certain amount of money (i.e. $1000) to "spend." What is the maximum number of items they can buy, choosing only from items being sold on a particular page of ads in the Classfieds?
  
• Tie math to the news by finding news stories that contain references to particular mathematical concepts – for example fractions, percentages, pie graphs, or averages. Explore the mathematical concept and how it is being used to supplement the story being reported in the news.
  
• The business pages are a great source of information that can be used to learn about and hone financial management skills. Have your students choose a package of four or five stocks in which to "invest." After making a pretend initial investment in each stock, have the students track the performance of their "portfolio" over a number of weeks or months. If you wish, this activity can lead to further investigation of different economic concepts that influence the performance of stocks and markets.

Technology

• Online news sites are becoming more and more central to our awareness of the news. Ask your students to investigate how different news Web sites report the same story. What similarities and differences do they notice between the sites' reporting of the news?
  
• Use the news to get your students to explore the various media formats available on the World Wide Web. Ask them to visit news Web sites and track a news story using as many media formats as possible. Examples include: streaming radio, downloadable audio files, podcasts, photographic slide shows, videos, and RSS feeds.
  
• Have your students create their own podcast, Web page, or video to report on a current events story.
  
• Ask your students to use the World Wide Web to find contact information for individuals mentioned in news stories that particularly catch their attention. The students can write or email these individuals to find out further information pertaining to the news story.