Use CNN10 for Daily Writing About Current Events

CNN10 is a great resource for teaching about current events. It's a 10 minute, daily video produced by CNN, and the target audience is middle and high school students. Each video will include three to four major news stories. Watching it regularly will help your students develop an awareness of what's going on around the world.

It's also a great resource to use as a basis for writing assignments about current events. This can be a good way to bridge the gap between social studies and language arts. If you watch it in your social studies class, you can incorporate more writing. If you watch it in your language arts class, you can incorporate more social studies.

Here's a 15 to 20 minute activity that you can incorporate into your class at either the beginning or the end of class. You can do this each day or once a week. However, you want to do it with some regularity to help the students learn the procedure. This will cut down on the time requried for instructions and transitions.

First, as an anticipatory set, check in with your students and ask them what they've heard about in the news that day. Then, watch the CNN10 video produced for the day. Afterwards, spend a few minutes discussing what the students saw. Identify each of the major stories, answer any questions students have, and have two to three students share their reactions to the news.

If no student responses are forthcoming, you can pose one of two questions:

1. Which story do you feel was the most important? Why?
2. Which story did you find the most interesting? Why?

After debriefing, assign the students a short, one paragraph writing assignment in which they do one of the following:

1. Summarize the news of the day, including a clear topic sentence and references to three news stories.
2. Identify the story you feel is most important, summarize the story, and explain why you feel it was important.
3. Identify the story you found most interesting, summarize the story, and explain why you found it interesting.

If you have sufficient time, you can write this in class and collect it. Or, you can watch the video at the end of the class and assign the writing for homework. Either way, using current events is a great way to help teach government in a fun way.

You can extend the length of this lesson by watching two videos instead of one. This is works well if you want to do this on a weekly basis instead of a daily basis.