At CUP, students engage with issues that directly impact them and their loved ones. Analyzing current events and news media helps students connect their individual experiences to a larger context and also helps them ask questions that improve their critical thinking skills. Students ask questions like: Who’s being quoted and what’s their perspective on the issue? How much decision-making power does this person have? 

To creatively investigate news events with your students, CUP’s Youth Education Manager Fielding Hong recommends the online resource Newsela. The site publishes news articles from trusted media sources and modifies them for different reading levels, organized by theme and school subject. This article on birthright citizenship offers a great entry point into the CUP project, The Wait, where students investigated the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. 

Here are some ideas to make news articles a little more creative for students:

+ Ask students to make a drawing of one idea they took away from the article

+ Have students make a comic strip with 4 images, showing what they imagine the daily life of someone quoted in the article to be like

+ Imagine one of the people quoted in the article got their way. What would the world look like 20 years from now?