Coyotes Comprehending Copy

From understanding what headlines and captions are to understanding the difference between news and opinion, the students at Dodson Elementary School are making the most of the newspapers they are delivered each week.

The Dodson staff invited the PCN to visit with students at the elementary school to see, first hand, how the newspaper was being used as a teaching tool through the Newspapers in Education program. In Mrs. Charity Hebert’s first and second grade class, students were sent on a scavenger hunt through the pages of the PCN to answer such questions as “who won the 2017 County Spelling Bee” and “what was the weather like on Thursday?” The students worked together on the first question and Tripp Lefdahl submitted the answer.

“Kanyon Stiles,” he answered, pointing to the name in the picture caption.

In Ms. Deserae Kill Eagle's third and fourth grade class, students had been reading the PCN for the previous month and any work they completed in association with the paper was stapled onto the classes' “In the News" Board. In each of the four elementary classes (sans kindergarten), students were tasked with thumbing through the Albertsons circular in order to plan a meal on a budget (though how many meals and the amount of money budgeted varied.) Last Tuesday, the “news board” in Ms. Kill Eagle’s class featured story-wheels in which articles had been diagramed in the Albertsons assignment, some students compared the prices of snack items versus more healthy types of food.

“Junky food isn’t that expensive, but healthy food is,” concluded Mason Lone Bear.

In Ms. Amber Azure’s fifth grade class, students watched CNN Student News before moving over to the printed word in the PCN. When asked which medium was better, Landon Fox did not hesitate with his answer.

“Newspapers,” he said. Fox said that he had seen his own name in the PCN a few times and admitted that having his name in print was “pretty cool.”

“I’d never been in a newspaper before,” Fox explained.

Other tasks completed in Ms. Azure’s class included a Sports Glossary (in which students searched the sports pages looking for a word they didn’t know to then find the word’s meaning), Fun with Nouns in which they marked stories with different color pencils depending on the type of nouns and Picture story which included using some imagination.

“They had to write what they thought was happening before the picture was snapped,” Ms. Azure said. She said the pictures included those of Malta’s Nate Costin and Dodson’s Shaun Ball and Ireland Best, the later two were easier to predict for the students as most had seen their schoolmates playing in the games pictured. Last, but not least, Ms. Azure said she had the students look for an “adopt a pet” feature in the PCN, but came up without one.

“We had to use a different newspaper because there isn’t an Adopt a Pet in the PCN,” Ms. Azure said. (The PCN is now working on getting an adopt a pet feature in its pages.)

In Ms. Kayla Messerly’s sixth grade class, students are given time to freely read the newspaper prior to being assigned such tasks as summarizing articles and a news scavenger hunt before an Albertsons assignment in which students had to build a grocery list on a budget of $150 for the week.

Emma Cole said she has been a reader of the paper even before it was delivered to the classroom as her father, Skip, is an avid reader of the PCN (thanks Skip.) She said that she had never seen her name in the pages of the PCN (she can now mark that off her bucket list) and her favorite weekly feature is the Athlete of the Week. Unlike Cole, Jean Jackson said she hadn’t read the paper before having it delivered to her desk. She said her favorite part of the PCN is “learning about what is going on in different places.”

“They love getting the paper every week,” Ms. Messerly added.