Newspapers in the Classroom

In most major cities the newspaper will have a program to help teachers use newspapers in their classroom for a variety of lessons. Typically these programs will even get local businesses and individuals to donate for this purpose. It may actually cost nothing for the teacher or school to get enough newspapers for several classrooms, but be warned their are problems for the school and teachers.

The newspapers are typically not delivered every day of the week. You may only get them one or two days per week. You can not absolutely count on them being delivered on time or even delivered at all. When they are delivered that may come in large heavy bundles and these bundles may be different from each other. Some of the bundles may only have the front page section, others may only have the classified sections. This means that if you actually want a whole newspaper for each student you will have to collate a bunch of sections. Even with student help, this is a lot of work.

A location must be selected for delivery and this location needs to be out of the weather. If a large delivery is left out in the open, it could get wet, broken open and scattered by the wind or people could start to take what they will consider "free" newspapers. This can create a super mess. The custodial staff will absolutely hate paper delivery days. You will also need a large recycling bin that can hold weeks of old newspapers. Even this can be a big problem. If it is out in the open people will throw other things into the recycling bin, they will try to take things out of the recycling bin and you could even have people try to sleep in the bins. You must have the bin in a locked area, but when the truck comes to collect the paper, they must have easy access. Teachers that say they want to use the newspapers will not always want to use them and this is a waste. Even with all these problems they can be a valuable resource.

Newspapers often will have certain days that they do specific topics. For example: the newspaper may print an entire page dedicated toward "Science" one day per week, so you may want to get the newspaper on that day if you were a science teacher. In my case I would want to get about 70 papers on the day they did science topics. Then I would want to tear out all the science pages for that day. Now I would have enough copies of that particular page for at least two science classes. If the article was really great I may want to get at least 36-38 of them laminated by the media center. The page would have to be one that I felt could be used for many years.

Pages like this, can become great short lessons or great starter lessons. They are also great lessons to leave for a substitute teacher. If the page can be cut and put into "sheet protectors" then you would not need to laminate them. You might consider making a worksheet for that newspaper article and make enough copies of the worksheet to put with the newspaper page. You could also scan the page and get it into a form that you could project on the wall or in a form that you could make into a transparency that you can use on an overhead projector.

The Social Studies teacher is usually the first teacher to jump at the chance to use newspapers in the classroom, but they can be very useful in many classes. Imagine how much was printed about the Olympics and how many discussions this could create in a physical education class that was forced into the auditorium because of bad weather outside. Sometimes newspapers will really stimulate personal stories from the teacher and students.

Some newspapers have a person hired as the educational coordinator for the program. This is the person that you contact to get the details. They often have workbooks and lesson plans ready made for the teacher to use. They like doing this program because it has been proven that students that use the newspaper early in their life are much more likely to buy and use newspapers as adults. The newspaper makes a fantastic resource if you make the effort to solve the problems associated with using it and if you really plan how to use it in the classroom.