Using the Newspaper for Daily Literacy Instruction

In this Elementary School Journal article, Michelle Jordan (Arizona State University) describes how a veteran teacher used the local newspaper for daily interactive readalouds with her first graders. This exposed students to sophisticated, ever-changing nonfiction texts, broadened their horizons, and engaged them in frequent, vocabulary- and conceptually rich discussions in line with Common Core expectations. Here are some of the ways the teacher scaffolded learning in these daily sessions:

• Emphasizing the unfolding nature of the world – Following stories and waiting for outcomes and modeling ways to talk about things that haven’t happened yet. For example, there were allegations that baseball pitcher Roger Clemens was lying about using performance-enhancing drugs and the teacher cautioned a student who called him a “cheater” that it was as yet unproven: “We have to wait to find that out.”

• Acknowledging uncertainty – This involved positioning themselves as fellow wonderers and following weather reports to see how predictions turned out.

• Improvising connections and engaging in improvisational storytelling – “Because newspapers are unpredictable in their daily subject matter, talk was less scripted in this activity than in other instructional events in this class,” says Jordan. “The teacher had to use whatever physical and conceptual materials were at hand in the news each day to develop students’ textual engagement.” This provided excitement and unexpected learning each day.

• Positioning students as members of a larger community – Every day, the teacher kicked off the newspaper activity with this question: “Did anyone hear or see anything they want me to look for in the newspaper?” The fact that newspapers contain real-time information about events that students might have heard about “reduced the unequal footing between the teacher and the students.” Jordan’s quantitative analysis of classroom interactions in the daily newspaper readalouds found that 55 percent of talk turns were made by individual students and students increasingly initiated topics as the year went on. Students highlighted stories about local or upcoming events and called attention to simultaneously occurring events – for example, one student mentioned that she had gone swimming over the weekend and the teacher drew attention to a news story and photo about a triathlon in Florida. “Look at all the folks who did the same thing you did. I bet you didn’t go swimming there, did you?”

“Extra! Extra! Read All About It: Teacher Scaffolds Interactive Read-Alouds of a Dynamic Text” by Michelle Jordan in The Elementary School Journal, March 2015 (Vol. 115, #3, p. 358-383); this article can be purchased at http://bit.ly/1CohlJ5; Jordan can be reached at mejorda2@asu.edu.

From the Marshall Memo #578