Developing Study Skills: Every Teacher's Responsibility Teachers' Aids

January 27, 1985|by DONNA HAGGERTY, Sunday Call-Chronicle.

Completing a simple homework or classroom assignment can seem like an impossible task to students who don't know how to study. Knowing how to outline, take notes, and scan, organize and classify information are critical to learning success. Without them, students can't begin to assimilate the amount of material covered in school.

The newspaper can be an ideal tool for developing or improving study skills. Following are related activities.


- Clip various types of information from the paper, like sports stories, world news, advertisements and comics. Have students sort them into piles of their choosing. Be sure students label each pile. Or, reverse the activity and have students clip articles to separate into given categories.

- Help students identify the various categories in the classified ad section, the sports scoreboard and the stock listings.

- Give students practice in skimming and classifying by having them skim, in a designated period of time, the entire newspaper to identify and clip articles, ads, etc. which deal with a given subject (e.g. women). Then ask them classify all the clippings into sub-categories.

- Ask students to classify the comics into categories of their choice. (Examples might be: animals - Garfield, Marmaduke, Animal Crackers; family life - For Better or Worse, Family Circus, Blondie, Lockhorns, Willy and Ethel)


- Show students how to skim newspaper pages by having them concentrate on headlines and photos and jump from one to another until they find topics that interest them. Encourage them to read these stories.

- Show students how to skim stories by having them concentrate on the headlines and first paragraphs (the leads). If any of the leads interest them, encourage them to read on for additional information.

- For practice in scanning, ask students to scan the front page of each section and summarize, orally or in writing, the most important news of the day.

- Give students several minutes to skim a section of the paper. Then ask them to put the section aside and write brief descriptions of what they read. Have them check to see how much they remembered accurately.

- Ask students to skim advertisements as well as stories by having them identify the 5W's (who, what, when, where, why) of several selected ads. Repeat the activity with photos.

- Clip several sets of articles. Separate the headlines from the stories and mix them up. See which students can skim the articles most quickly and match the correct headlines and articles.

- Provide students with articles to read while you prepare questions related to those stories. Pose the questions to the students and have them skim to find the answers.

- Have students skim a long article to locate information which either supports or contradicts a given opinion or conclusion about the topic of the article.

- Have students skim a selection to determine its main idea.

- Ask students to scan the temperature listings in the weather report on B2 and identify the warmest and coldest cities.

- Organize a scavenger hunt through the newspaper to help students practice scanning. Direct them to find 10 specific things, like a photo, an illustration or number in an ad or a word in a headline.


- Help students practice taking notes by having them jot down the main ideas of articles you read to them.

- Show students how to outline the information in a news story.

- Help students outline the contents of an explanatory and persuasive article. Be sure they emphasize important details.

- Provide students with a feature article and ask them to suggest subheads which could be inserted into the article.


- Show students where the newspaper index is located and how it helps readers find what they need in the paper. Do the same thing with the index in the classied ad section.

- Give students a short list of subjects or titles and ask them to state the page or range of pages on which each of the articles would be located, based on the newspaper's index.

- Help students devise a clear and logical indexing system for 20 classified ads you've clipped from the paper.


- Ask students to underline the sentences/phrases in selected stories, editorials, and ads that convey the main idea.

- Organize a matching game for students by separating articles and headlines and photos and captions. Mix them up and see if students can correctly match them.

- Have all students read the same two articles, put them away, and write the main ideas in their own words. Discuss their work.

Morning Call Articles