Current Events for Educators

Using Current Events in the Classroom

Educational research and statistics have shown that Literacy Skills are fundamental to becoming a successful and productive member of society. The ability to read and write is necessary for students in order for them to become active citizens, pursue educational opportunities, and find employment. Standardized Tests like the Explore, Plan, ACT, and PSAE test students on their ability to read and comprehend at an age-appropriate level but sadly, a large portion of students fall short each year.

To become better readers, students must practice reading often, selecting from a wide range of materials. Written at a sixth grade level, newspapers provide great material for reading and skill practice. The Current Events assignments provided in this section can help students practice reading and comprehension skills using informational texts. Students can access all of these articles without the discussion questions through the Student Page. (click here)

The Current Events worksheets are designed to meet the College Readiness Standards as identified by the ACT, but the skills are appropriate practice for readers in grades 6-12. Each article is accompanied by a set of discussion questions to meet the following standards:
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Main Ideas and Author’s Approach: Skills include identifying and inferring main ideas of passages, understanding the overall approach of the writer, and summarizing basic events and ideas

Supporting Details: Skills include locating basic facts and important details, interpreting and inferring about how details are used to support a point, and understanding the function of a passage

Sequential, Comparative, and Cause-Effect Relationships: Skills include determining time or sequence of events in passages, identifying stated or implied cause-effect relationships in a passage, and understanding dynamics and subtleties in relationships between people, ideas, etc.

Meanings of Words: Skills include using context to determine word meaning of literal and technical words and phrases, determining and understanding the appropriate meaning of figurative language and difficult vocabulary based on context, and understand the implications of words, phrases, and descriptive language

Generalizations and Conclusions: Skills include drawing simple, subtle, and complex generalizations and conclusions about people, ideas, etc. in a passage, using details that support main points in a passage to arrive at conclusions, and synthesizing information from different portions of a text to form conclusions and generalizations

The titles below appear in order so that the most recent news articles are at the top of the list. Click on a title to follow a link to a web version of the article or click on the Question Mark icon next to the title for a PDF document of the Discussion Questions.

Discussion Questions

“Gabrielle Gifford’s Tucson Shooting Puts Arizona’s Gun Culture in Spotlight”

This activity is for upper middle and high school students. For younger students, Weekly Reader has a kid-friendly current event on this topic on their website. For more background about the shooting, access the following documents: