How to Use News Articles

Magazines & Newsletters & Books oh my...

When I taught my 8th grade honors class we started FVR around the mid-way mark. I have oodles of books but I've found that a book can be intimidating and have been wanting to start smaller. Martina Bex and Maris Hawkins put out a monthly newsletter ($), Bex puts out a magazine written by students (free), and Mundo de Pepita is a store in TPT that creates AMAZING non-fiction readers. But, I have no idea how to do this. First step: turn on magpie mode and collect what other people are doing.

From the blog of Maris Hawkins

This is a cliff notes version of what Maris wrote in her blog. To see the entire thing click the link below. It's worth it!

1. How to develop a unit around articles (link to TPT resource here)
   1. Read: Read article and then fill out one page handout found here (also in my dropbox under Mundo). Vote on article they most enjoyed and then group them by articles.
   2. Small Groups: Divide students into groups of 3-5 by the article they most enjoyed. Students will read the article then use the authentic resources (??) to investigate even more into the topic. The small group will present their topic to ONE other small group, and they will also ask the other group questions to start an interpersonal conversation. The small groups is so each person has a chance to talk. That can be lost in a larger class.
   3. Comparisons: Can't do step 2 because I don't have any older articles yet. The next day group them according to the article that they liked, give them an older article (but new to them) and I have them complete a Venn Diagram comparing the article they liked the day before to the one that they currently read. Then, they write a comparison based on what they had read. Then share their favorite video on Flipgrid.
   4. Dictation: The next week, we had more news to read! I started with a dictation. Pick out five significant sentences in the articles. Read them aloud numerous times while students write them down in Spanish. This allows you to highlight certain grammar points or spelling. After the dictation, I ask a few PQA questions to the students. One article was about José Andrés, and he has numerous restaurants in the DC area. Discuss which restaurants were his and which ones students had visited. Also, another program was Hamilton. Talk about who had seen Hamilton before.
   5. Gimkit Collab: This takes you into the next week with new articles. Give the students the articles and have them highlight three main ideas from each one. Discuss the important parts, and review any questions that students have from each article. After that, students craft questions to do a GimKit collab.
   6. Chat stations: Students work with partner to answer questions (doc in my dropbox under Mundo) then have them do a presentational writing (??) and then discuss as a whole class. Maris played Trashketball as she asked the class questions (also called Grudgeball.)
   7. Quiz: Use Sra. Chase's Quick Quizzes (located in my Google Drive) Let student choose which article to quiz themselves on
   8. Project: have students research their own news topic and create a newscast in the form of a video in a comprehensible way.

Me

1. PDF of notes I took during a conference on ways to use readers/magazines