In a world where truth is increasingly elusive and facts rapidly get diluted under the influence of time, newspapers become the most authentic reference in the classroom. It is simply a resource every teacher should utilize.

To start with, a newspaper is a living textbook which can be used to enhance skills in reading, writing, listening, speaking, math, social studies and science. Unlike the usual textbooks, which are several years outdated by the time they get into students’ hands, the newspaper comes alive and authentic, expanding the curriculum with an unlimited amount of information to use as background for learning activities. That aside, they are adaptable to all curriculum and levels, provide enough sections to interest all students, and are a cost-effective way to educate students.

That having been said, how then can one use them in the classroom? One can use the newspaper to teach reading and writing for meaning, using the following activity: remove the headlines from a number of news stories and display the headline-less stories on a classroom bulletin board. Then provide students with the headlines, and ask them to match each to one of the stories. As students replace the missing headlines, ask them to point out the words in the headlines that helped them find the correct story. Then distribute headlines from less prominent stories and ask students to choose one and write a news story to go with it. When the stories have been completed, provide each student with the story that originally accompanied the headline to see how close they areto the original story.

You can further put your students’ writing skills to the test by challenging them to write a winning classified advert. Read aloud a few catchy classifieds as well as a few non-catchy ones. Then, discuss what makes one ad more appealing than the other. Talk about how you have to grab the reader’s attention and come up with a "catch phrase” that will make the reader want to act immediately. Then, have students think about what they would like to sell for their classified ad. They can then write a brief ad about what they are trying to sell.

Similarly, you can also teach vocabulary with it. Assign each student a letter of the alphabet and ask themto browse through the newspaper to find five unfamiliar words beginning with the assigned letter, then look up the definition of each. After that, have each student create and illustrate a dictionary page containing the five words and their meanings. The pages can then be combined into a classroom dictionary. In a variation of this activity, you might ask students to look in the newspaper for any of the following:words with a particular suffix or prefix, words containing a particular vowel sound or consonant blend, compound words, words in the past, present, and future tenses or possessives. Older students might look for examples of similes, metaphors, irony, hyperbole, and satire.

In addition to the above, you can teach parts of speech using a newspaper. After reviewing the definition of a noun with your class, you can have them select a story from the front page of today’s newspaper to find the nouns. They can underline the people they find in red, the places in blue and the things in green or just list them in their books. Then they can also make a list of nouns they can find looking around the classroom. This applies to other parts of speech too.

You can even explore geography by asking each student to scan the newspaper for stories that illustrate each of the five themes of geography: location, place, human interaction and the environment, movement and communication, and regions. Depending on the level you are teaching, you can then display the stories on a classroom bulletin board labeled with the five geography themes.

In a nut shell, newspapers are very important in teaching various skills, many of which haven’t been mentioned here due to space limitation. Apart from the suggested activities, every teacher can find their own creative ways of using the newspaper to bring life into the classroom.

The writer is a Language Consultant