How We Do Current Events as an Elective and Why I Think it is Important

When I sat down with my high schooler with a list of electives she could choose from to do this year, she chose current events as one of those. I thought I'd write a post on what we do for our current event subject.

Each morning we start off with Channel One News. I was so glad when I came upon this website because I remember being in school and Channel One News came on every morning and we had to watch it in class. I'm not trying to make our homeschool like "public school", but my oldest and I grab a cup of coffee and just cozy up to watch the news like many Americans do in the morning. So I was thrilled to find it. It is definitely a news source that relates to middle school and high school students, even teaching them a "news related word of the day" that they may hear in stories in the video. Sometimes there are even polls that you can vote on after the video and they could be featured in the next day video. We participated in one of the polls on our first day of watching and my oldest thought it was pretty cool to see the poll and responses on the news the next day. Even if your child leaves a comment after the poll, they even feature some of those comments. Each day there's a different video that pertains to everyday news and I don't find it too biased.

Then there are the activities we do throughout the week after watching our news video of the day. The first day consists of filling out a current events journal page. I either let her pick a story she watched on Channel One News, or she can go to other sources as long as they are valid sources (www.abcnews.com, foxnews.com, etc.). You can download this sheet here from www.kathysclutteredmind.com for free.

Our second day is always starting with the news and then learning new words that are in the news. She picks 5-10 words that she doesn't know and finds the definition along with synonyms. Then she does an activity with the words and synonyms or definitions that she researched. She gets to choose if she does WORD ART, CROSSWORD PUZZLE, WORD SEARCH, or her own project to do with words.

After watching Channel One News, the third day my daughter chooses to do either a comic strip dialogue or a news broadcast project that pertains to her news article that she wrote on the journal page on day one or she can do it on a topic she learned from the news this week. You can find the comic strip dialogue here and the news broadcast project here for free thanks to the Panicked Teacher.   

Our final day of the week, day four following Channel One News is news topic discussion day. So each week I come up with a news-related topic to discuss with her. For example, one week we focused on how to spot fake news vs. real news. You can actually find that lesson here. We watched a Mediaocracy video that talks even more about the effects of social media and the news. Another week we discussed biased media and went to https://www.allsides.com/ and looked at the difference of opinions, the point of views, and biased views from the different news sources and discussed it. So this is what I mean by discussing news related topics. 

I think its important to teach your child what's happening in the world and the news so they become informed and involved. I can't tell you how many times my oldest came to me and told me something she saw on Instagram during the Presidential election that clearly wasn't true but because she saw it on social media, she thought it was. So I believe that in this social media age, we need to teach our young people to be informed with truth, especially when it comes to our world and national news.