Remnants

Over the course of the year, my current events class has helped to create several bulletin boards for the room. Right now we are studying international news and each student is creating either a poster or PowerPoint presentation on one country. Part of their presentation is to include at least two news-worthy events happening in their country. I want the students to see news beyond our American perspective. As I was thinking about this idea of perspectives I noticed our local newspaper had a number of stories from around the world. I thought to myself that it would be interesting to track how many different countries might appear in this newspaper over the course of a several weeks. This idea has spawned our latest bulletin board in which we are tracking the news stories from around the world. After tracing a world map onto large paper using an LCD projector and www.worldmaps.com, I challenged the students to find as many countries as possible over the next few weeks. To help the students get an idea of where these countries are located I’ve created a color coded key and have labeled each article with its country name. I’ve also attempted to tape each article near its country on the map. I have also limited the students to articles found in one newspaper. We have a classroom subscription in which we receive 5 newspapers daily. My goal is to spend a few minutes each Friday going through our weeks worth of papers and finding articles to add to the bulletin board. So far we have about 20 countries.