Thursday, March 22, 2018

Thing 21: News Literacy

News literacy has definitely become a hot topic within the past few years. Many world events have caused an outbreak is hoax writing or satirical writing. Teaching students news literacy is very important and should be a part of media literacy skills. This is definitely one piece I have struggled with this year as I only have kindergarten and first-grade classes. How do you help a five or six-year-old understand the news around them may not be real? At that age, a lot of their world is still "make-believe".  I found a few of the kid sites to be really helpful viewing the different ways that they discuss news. It is still important to teach our littlest ones about the world around them but at that age, it is very difficult not to cross the line and ruin their childhood.

I have a free Newsela account that I use when I am teaching summer school. I find it very helpful to be able to print the articles off and have the short three to five question quiz following the article. It is important to teach students about the world around them with reliable resources. I also love that you can adjust the reading level for the students you are working with. Of course the students in summer school are there for a couple of reasons- they didn't like their teacher, they refused to do the word, they are lazy or the work was in fact too difficult and nobody noticed to help (although this isn't a common reason there are a few students that still slip through the cracks because they can normally fake it enough to not get noticed.). Newsela is a great site to use. I hope to continue using it in the future.

Teaching our students about news literacy is very important. They need to be able to determine the facts from the fiction. They need to know how to determine what is really going on and what is an over exaggeration. It is difficult to teach students about news literacy when many of them get their news from social media. It is important to discuss social media and its role in the lives of our students today. Social media is a huge culprit for fake news and it is definitely important to talk to our students about it and how it affects them.


1 comment:

  1. Such a good point about being really careful with news and the younger kids. I agree, they don't need to be exposed to all the awful stuff. Good to be able to find some interesting environmental or science news that you can use to illustrate those lessons for them.

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