Classroom Activities - Elementary

Language Arts

Read and Repeat - 1:2
Skill: read with developing fluency
Have the students follow along as you read the headlines from the front page. Have them repeat the headlines after they have been read. Can any of the students read any of the headlines on their own?

Find the Letter - 1:4
Skill: use of letter-sound associations
Have the students find letters from the headlines and work with those letters. Can they find a word that begins with the letter "C"? Can they find a word that begins with the same letter as their name? You may want to play a game with them. Ask them to find a word that begins with "C" and then let the student who finds the word ask the class to find the next letter-sound.

Get the Job Done - 2:2
Skill: composing texts
What jobs in the classroom need to be done? Have the students look at the help wanted ads to see how they are written. Have them read some ads aloud. They can create a chart to show what the abbreviations mean. Then they can write an ad looking for someone to do a classroom job.

Social Studies

Photo Info - I 1:3
Skill: distinguish among the past, the present and the future
Have students look at photos and ask students what they think happened after the photo was taken. They can also tell what they think happened before the photos were taken. They can list the characters or the settings in the photos as well.

Planning Your Free Time - I 1:4
Skills: place events of their lives in chronological order
Talk with your students about how they use their free time. Have them imagine that they have an entire free day to spend any way they like. Using the entertainment section of the newspaper, have them schedule an entire day of fun. To make it more challenging, have them schedule two separate days, one to spend with family and one to spend with friends.

The Five W´s - I 2:1
Skill; identify who was involved, what happened and where it happened
Can your students find an interesting article in today's newspaper? Have them find such a story and write the five W's - who, what, when, where and why - to summarize the story.

Mathematics

Pages Countdown - I 1:1
Skill: recognize, describe and extend numerical patterns
The students can count by twos, threes, fours and fives by using the page numbers of the newspaper. Have the students circle the page numbers in red as they count by twos, circle in blue as they count by threes, fours in green and fives in orange.

Geometry Search - II 1:1
Skill: recognize and name familiar shapes
Have the students search through the newspaper for triangles, squares, rectangles, and circles and trace the shapes with markers and crayons. They can cut out the shapes and create a working wall of information to include the shapes, the number of sides and the angles of each shape. Discuss which shape is found most often and which is the hardest to find.

In Position II 2:2
Skill: locate and describe objects in terms of their orientation
Challenge the students to go on a scavenger hunt to find pictures that represent position. For example, they can find an object that is "up" in the sky or an object that is "down" on the ground. What is in the "front" and in the "back" of the photo?

Science

TV Time - I 1:6
Skill: construct charts and graphs and prepare summaries of observations
The students can examine the television grid and pick five of their favorite shows. They can make a chart of the starting times, ending times and total minutes for each program, Then they can create paper plate clocks to indicate the starting and ending times of the shows found in the television listings.

Converting Metric - I 1:4
Skill: use simple measurement devices to make metric measurement
Have students convert food items or recipes in the newspaper from standard measurements to their metric equivalents. They can make estimates before performing the calculations. Have them make a chart to show all the results. Do your students think the U.S. should join other countries in using the metric system? Why or why not?

Making Sense of the Senses - II 1:1
Skill: generating reasonable questions about the world based on observation
Using advertisements or photos in the paper, ask students to circle or color objects according to their sense of taste, touch, smell, sight, or hearing. Direct the students to circle the objects they can taste in yellow, those they can touch in red, objects they can smell in blue, those they can hear in green, and the objects they can see in orange. Have them make a picture graph to show the results of their search. They can write 3 observations about their graph.