News you can use in the classroom
Thursday, 17 March 2005
Here are some suggestions, by speakers at the Making News: Teach All About It! conference, on how the newspaper can be used in the classroom:
Don't stop at English lessons
English is not the only subject teachers can use newspapers for, said Nanyang Technological University lecturer and former journalist Hedwig Alfred. They could use them to teach mathematics too.
For instance, students can be asked to measure the angle a ball has entered the net in the graphics that illustrate football games in the sports pages.
They can also be asked to draw graphs and pie charts using data like the number of fouls committed, corners taken and shots on target in a match.
In science and geography classes, news reports on, say, cyanide poisoning can be useful in explaining chemical reactions, while a picture of a rice field could serve as the starting point for a lesson on the processing of rice.
Crime and vocabulary
Education consultant Cheah Yin Mee finds crime stories especially effective when teaching primary school pupils English.
She suggests giving them shorter articles and asking them to pick out descriptive phrases and words which they can use in their compositions.
They could also be asked to compare how two newspapers write about the same crime, to teach them the different ways to start an essay.
From ads to maths
Lesson material is not only in news reports, said Ms Alfred. Children can be taught percentages in maths class, for example, with newspaper advertisements of shops having sales.
Pictures can kick off a discussion during English lessons. Youngsters could be asked to imagine and write about the events which resulted in the photograph.
An opinion piece with movie reviews
Students can learn to write opinion pieces from reading movie reviews rather than just the commentary pages in newspapers, said Ms Alfred.
Victoria School, added Straits Times editor Han Fook Kwang, finds the Forum pages serve just as well for that too.
(Copyright 2005 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.)