Current Event Project

Today we presented our current event presentation to the class. I think that it went really well. My partner and I chose to do our current event on changes taking place in elementary school's cafeterias. We had our class read the article we picked and then watch a brief video on how to create a healthy food plate. Afterward we modeled a dinner plate that we made in order to show what the students would be doing in their groups. Then we gave them time to create their own healthy lunches on the power point. The class seemed really engaged and enjoyed the activity. One group even made their lunch a vegetarian lunch because one of the members in their group was a vegetarian! Afterwards we had the students present their plates to the class. 

Here is the link to our power point! 

Reflection: 

Current events are very important to use incorporate in the classroom! There are so many different tools to use when talking about current events. We used this website to help us! I think it is really important for students to know things that are going on in the world and especially things that could effect them. We used Newsela to find the current events for out project. Newsela is a great tool because you can highlight the article, change the reading level and even create quizzes right on the website. What I didn't like about using the website was that it confined us to using just their articles and it was hard to find one that we liked for using the "Create a menu" activity. I felt that our activity went really well. The class all had really nice comments to say about our activity and all of the "wishes" mostly had to do with having more time. We were confined to just ten minutes (we went over a couple minutes). I think the time constraint effected out activity negatively because they didn't have enough time to watch the full video and had to rush in the activity. When doing this a real class I would change the amount of time we had for this activity to be more around 20 minutes to give the students ample time to complete. 

In The Classroom: 

In my future classroom I would love to include current events. Depending on what grade I have the way I teach current events would differ. If I was teaching this to a first grade class I would choose articles that they would understand. Maybe something that was interesting happening in the area. The article would have to be something light and fun because the students are so young. The students could also find their own current events and discuss them in class. If the students are older I could teach using more worldly articles. Things that involve something deeper than I could address in a lower grade classroom. They would be able to have more of discussion about articles including having debates about different opinions. Students could pick a current event and teach that event to the class like we did in class. The articles can be used for other things like sequencing, word hunts, the five w's etc.