The Exhibition for Free School Lunch

The Exhibition for Free School Lunch

     Throughout my educational career as a student, I never once thought that I would be finding a current event to use through a different point of view. I had always been used to writing essays on current events and whether I agreed with them or not, but this time, the purpose of finding a current event was to tie the content in with special theme. That is the purpose of using a current event in the classroom. The current event should be something that the students are somewhat already familiar with and can possibly relate to on some level. A lesson that incorporates the use of a current event should be student friendly and relate to the Social Studies concept at hand in some sort of way. Current events will let the students know about what is going on outside of the country or what is happening in other places rather than just the state that the students live in. A current event lesson could also reflect what is going on in the local community.

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The current event type of cooperative learning lesson that my group and I collaboratively designed revolved around the article, Free School Lunch for More Students. This news article can be found on Newsela. At first, my group members and I wanted to design a mini-lesson in which it would relate to a concept in our Unit Plan and that concept is voting. The topic for voting for free school lunch would be a suitable topic because it is something that is age-appropriate, education friendly, and something that directly relates to the students. We had fantastic reactions to our inquiry lesson plan when our students had to vote for the best principal candidate, so this lesson we thought would be the best direction to turn to. All of our ideas for this mini-lesson came directly from us and were original. Not only did we use a news article, but we also found two videos that revolved around the same concept which can be viewed below.

Elementary School Kitchen Manager Fired For Giving Free Lunches To Hungry Students

School lunch: Is $1.50 a child enough?

     Both of these videos are relevant to the current event topic of deciding to chose free lunch or not. The method that we chose was to use Padlet in a cooperative learning technique that revolved around Think-Pair-Share and Talking Circles. I felt that these methods were wonderful to use because the students needed to collaborate and express their thoughts in a conversation before voting. The overall experience was an enjoyable and memorable experience that I will always remember when using current events in my own classroom. 

Current Events in my Future Classroom

     When thinking about using a current event in my future classroom, I can only express how much of an engaging adventure it will be. I believe that using a current event to express a point in the classroom or even to just make the students aware of the world outside the classroom is a fantastic approach to teaching social studies. There are websites and news print that can be addressed in student-friendly terms that can apply what is going on in the news to the students in which they will understand. I also learned that you don't have to base your current events on only videos or hard copies, but you can use the internet to your advantage and find so many articles that you can use. I definitely know that I am going to use Newsela and Tween Tribune in my future practice. I enjoyed using Newsela to find current event articles, it's very simple to use and easy to find articles for a specific subject. I liked how you can literally pick which age group you are aiming for and which subject you are looking to teach. I think that Newsela will be a website that is effective for all teachers to use, especially when they are teaching social studies specifically because of how much access the teachers can have to current event related resources. With the use of this website, the students can even use this feature to find current event articles to explore because there is a teacher/student setting on Newsela. I love that about this website and I think that, that particularly is what makes this website effective when teaching social studies.  When thinking about teaching with current events to different age students, it all depends on their age. Current events can be used with all students, but you should always make sure that the articles are at the students reading level in which they can comprehend what they are reading. I would also make sure that the engaging experiences that correspond with the current event would reflect the grade level appropriateness depending on the grade.