Lesson Plan

Creating Current Event Comprehension

Engage and enlighten students with global events.
Lisa B.
Classroom teacher
Hershey Middle School
Hershey, PA
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My Grades 6, 7, 8
My Subjects Social Studies

Students will be able to identify places and regions that were in the news. 

Students will be able to cite specific evidence to explain the cause and effect of news stories. 

Students will be able to publish their summary of a major news source utilizing media and recorded audio. 


Common Core Connections: 


RH.6.6. Distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text. 

RH.6.7. Integrate visual information with other information in print and digital texts. 

WHST.6.6. Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and present relationships between information and ideas clearly and efficiently. 

Social Studies
global awareness
Grades 6 - 8
All Notes
Teacher Notes
Student Notes

1 Preview

As students enter the room, they would use Socrative to list news stories they had heard or read during the week. 

After 3 minutes, the question would be closed and we would look at the responses.

This can be done in small groups with the students communicating about stories they heard or the teacher can review all the class responses in a whole group setting. 

2 Hook

Free to Try, Paid

As a class we would watch the Week in Rap from Flocabulary. The Week in Rap is published every Friday by Flocabulary to summarize in a song the major stories from the week. The songs are only a few minutes long.

As they watch the story, they should jot down any news stories that they submited during the Preview Activity that were also mentioned in the Week in Rap. This prompts students paying more attention to the news on their own during the week leading up to watching Flocabulary. 

After watching it once, students would share what they heard. They would also have the chance to answer questions if they did not understand a story. The teacher should prompt with some open ended questions to encourage students to think critically about the news story.

As a class we would watch the story a second time so they could listen for the stories they might have missed the first time. 

3 Application

Students would select an article that matched a story from the Week in Rap to read. After they read a story and answered the accompanying questions, they would be allowed to select additional stories based on their interests to read. 

4 Guided Practice

A significant and/or complex news story would be selected by the teacher. 

An article with the story would be uploaded to Curriculet. The students would read the story through Curriculet with access to annotations, definitions, videos, maps, and images to help them understand the story. There would also be checks for understanding embedded in the reading through questions. 

The types of questions should be on both the content and the reading. Students need to distinguish between facts, opinions, and reasoned judgments for news stories. This can be accomplished while analyzing the author's point of view and/or purpose. Often this could include providing a second narrative of the same news story with a different perspective. 

5 Enrichment

To better understand the cause and effect of current events, the human and physical geography of a place needs to be understood. 

Students who finish early can work with their partner to explore either Google Earth or Google Maps to see the geography.

  • They should enable the layer with pictures.
  • They should zoom in and zoom out to get both perspectives of the location. 

If they discover something connected to the current event, they can update their instaGrok/concept map.