Jump to content

Menu

Do you study current events with your kids? How?


Recommended Posts

Thinking about this as a possibility for next year. My older dd will be in 8th grade and in her last year of home schooling before public high school. Our possible news sources are the local paper (which we mostly use to point out grammar errors at this point!), Time magazine, PBS, and on-line news sources. I've been thinking maybe read through an article together each week and discuss it, maybe short writing assignments from time to time. If you've managed to make a study of current events part of your weekly routine, what does it look like in your house?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We use CNN Student News. Free daily 10 minute videos, presented as a student-friendly newscast, available on HLN, as a podcast, or watch on their website. Here is a link that explains it. We do plenty of writing in other subjects, so we just watch on our iPad, then discuss.

 

 

 

I keep meaning to make use of CNN Student News too! I think we'll just watch and discuss.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

CNN Student News looks really cool--thanks! I hadn't heard of it before. We just watched today's podcast on iTunes. I thought they did a nice job of teaching as well as reporting, like explaining what income tax is. The girls enjoyed watching it too. This might work for us.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

CNN Student News looks really cool--thanks! I hadn't heard of it before. We just watched today's podcast on iTunes. I thought they did a nice job of teaching as well as reporting, like explaining what income tax is. The girls enjoyed watching it too. This might work for us.

Definitely! I appreciate the teaching built in to the news stories. I'm not ashamed to admit, I've learned plenty from them myself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Seems like you have found what you are looking for, but I will put in a mention for Newsademic. It comes out every other week as a PDF.

Sometimes I assign him one or two of the advanced activities or direct his attention to a particular article, but not always. He mostly just reads what interests him and tells me about it.

 

I'm saving the editions in a binder, hoping that at the end of 2013 I will get him to choose his top 10 events...or something like that :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ours is very informal at this point. DD#1 has a alarm clock radio in her room. She listens to a semi-local (country music) station when she can & picks up a lot of national news that way. Then, she asks about it. We discuss & look up topics as necessary.

 

Sometimes, we spend so much time on it, I think I should give her credit on her report card!

 

I loved my semester-long Current Events class in 8th grade. We read the Big City newspaper (front page & certain other articles as picked by the teacher) and discussed. I don't remember papers that we had to write or much in the way of homework.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Seems like you have found what you are looking for, but I will put in a mention for Newsademic. It comes out every other week as a PDF.

Sometimes I assign him one or two of the advanced activities or direct his attention to a particular article, but not always. He mostly just reads what interests him and tells me about it.

 

I'm saving the editions in a binder, hoping that at the end of 2013 I will get him to choose his top 10 events...or something like that :)

 

 

Thanks. This looks good too, and I do like the idea of reading articles, not just watching news. But I might end up sticking with free resources which I feel should be doable for current events.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We use CNN Student News. Free daily 10 minute videos, presented as a student-friendly newscast, available on HLN, as a podcast, or watch on their website. Here is a link that explains it. We do plenty of writing in other subjects, so we just watch on our iPad, then discuss.

 

 

We watch CNN Student New as well. It is short, daily, and allows us to get a brief overview of the news. We just watch it on their website. Usually the boys will discuss what they have seen.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not sure if you're Christian, but we LOVE the God's World News. They are kind of like the old Weekly Reader thing we had in school, and they have them for all age ranges.

 

We also use this and like it. We get 'Top Story' for our 7th grader. I order a single subscription to 5th gr and 3rd gr Scholastic News for our younger kids, but everyone reads everyone else's magazines too!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We also use CNN Student News daily and receive God's World News and World magazine. There are two other websites that we use as well that I don't believe have been mentioned: studentnewsdaily.com and hmcurrentevents.com. Also, my dd loves to watch the videos on The Weather Channel app which are mostly current events-type videos. On Fridays, she picks one story from the week and writes a one paragraph summary in her own words.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

We put Flipboard on DS12's iPad. It provides a customizable news stream by content area, collected from different news sources. He also checks Khan Academy for understanding of some things, such as the economy of the EU. We use current events as a springboard for researching the events of the past that led up to them.

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Listening in. I bought a copy of NY Times, national edition a couple of weeks ago for this sort of thing, and as practice with a real newspaper. Don't know when that will be a historic item like horse and buggy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

we watch CNN student news (during the typical school year) while we eat lunch, and I generally have NPR and BBC playing etc. We have an online subscription to NY Times and my son asked to have access through his Itouch. He also watches Rachel Maddow with us on occasion. I get the video podcast and watch it on my phone, lol.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've thought about a younger news paper but never ended up getting one. We watch the news together sometimes, we gather to watch political debates, I'll show them interesting articles from our various local papers. We also get the free copy of Imprimis from Hillsdale College: http://www.hillsdale...ws/imprimis.asp

and I leave it around for free reading and interesting lunch discussions. We also tend to tie it in with our history discussions... or actually the other way around.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest rpm1026

My ds12 loves to read the Wall Street Journal. We spend a lot of time talking about any article that interests him, then the rest of the family jumps in on the discussion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...