Teaching Activities for Key Stage 3
Many of the following activities will probably fill a 40 minute lesson period however; this will depend of the ability level of your pupils.
Expand your vocabulary. Assign each pupil a letter of the alphabet. Ask pupils to browse through The Newspaper, find five unfamiliar words beginning with the assigned letter, and look up the definition of each. Then ask each pupil to create and illustrate a dictionary page containing the five words and their meanings. Combine the pages 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
possessives
plurals
Older students might look for examples of similes, metaphors, irony etc
Ask pupils to locate a picture in The Newspaper and write a short paragraph stating what you think may have happened before the picture. Repeat this activity predicting the outcome.
Get your pupils to become reporters. They should look for interesting events and then write down the facts and develop a newspaper article explaining an event.
Pupils should choose a headline from The Newspaper and replace it with words that mean the same thing. For example, instead of "big" use "mammoth." How do your pupils new headlines compare to the original?
Read a story about someone in the news you would like to know more about. Pretend you are going to interview that person and write questions you would ask.
Ask pupils to look through The Newspaper to find stories about people who have made a difference. How do these stories make them feel?
Choose one page from the newspaper and try to come up with how many different jobs are involved in creating that one page.