CURRENT EVENTS: Daily reporting of the news
  Author: S.Clark 

  Have your students relate current events to their classmates
  each morning.
  
  Procedure:

  1) At the beginning of the year split the class into five groups
  - a Monday group, Tuesday group, etc., so that each morning
  you can expect to hear from six to seven students. 

  2) Each student is to go to the front of the room, show the
  newspaper article or internet article to the class, and then briefly
  tell about the contents of the article, using the 5 W's (who, what,
  where, when, why). Classmates can ask questions if they want to. 

  3) Each day the 6-7 articles are posted on a bulletin board
  (heading: What's News???).

  4) Each week focus on a particular type of news.... start with local,
  then provincial the next week, then national, and finally world news.

  5) At the end of four weeks, we focus on local news again.

  TEACHER'S NOTE: Of course, if something really newsworthy happens
  we'll focus on it regardless of the type of news being focused on
  that week. 

  6) At the end of the week, every Friday, take the articles down from
  the bulletin board and distribute them to the kids, randomly.

  7)  Students are to write a brief summary of the article in front of
  them and hand it in after going through the writing process
  (rough draft - conference - second draft - final copy).

  TEACHER'S NOTE: Doing these weekly summaries helps prepare them for
  the research they do each January for the speech they will be giving
  to the class.
  
  Here in Ontario, "oral communication" was recently added to our
  report card, and it was a no sweat situation for me because, with
  current events, I assess their oral skills formally each week.

  The written summary also gives me a weekly mark for written expression.