This Week’s Anton Lesson Plan:
Stories that revolve around scientific discovery and health issues provide a significant portion of topics for newspapers to cover on a regular basis. Chalk it up to the fact that these features have a direct connection with day-to-day life, whether it’s a study revealing what may be the latest cancer-causing culprit, how climate change might affect rising sea levels and cause local flooding or precautionary measures that need to be taken during natural disasters.
The following are exercises students can do to experience the different facets of health and science that make up the content of a newspaper.
• Many things around the home need electricity to work. Search through the newspaper and find as many things as you can that need electricity. How many did you find? How many of them do you have in your home?
• Find an article about a fire in your town. Create a poster stressing fire safety.
• Let your students develop a method of making predictions. For example, given one article in the newspaper, can they predict how often the word “the” will appear in the newspaper?
• Study a story reporting an accident. Can you determine the probable cause of the accident? Could the accident have been avoided? If someone was injured, could the injury have been avoided or its severity reduced?
