Reading Time for Kids to Comprehend and Analyze Current Events in 5th Grade

Imagine a room full of fifth grade students engaged in a lively discussion about current events. Each student in the classroom is able to make connections between themselves and the world outside the classroom. They begin to see the role that they play as citizens and develop an awareness of the world and the issues that will affect them as they grow older. It is a wonderful picture, one that my fifth grade team hopes to accomplish using this proposal. I am a fifth grade teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina. Our school is comprised of a wonderfully diverse group of children. Myself and the other four fifth grade teachers want to utilize Time for Kids in order to engage our students with the history being made every day! We envision allowing our students to read about current events while making connections to both history and the future. With 50 subscriptions, we could rotate copies of Time for Kids among the five fifth grade classes every week. We plan to integrate the Time for Kids magazine into our social studies and reading curriculum. Not only will the students write, learn and think critically on current events, but they will also be able to increase proficiency at reading nonfiction text ? a challenging task for many fifth graders. We will use the Time for Kids to give students practice at important reading strategies and skills such as summarizing, drawing conclusions, making inferences, asking questions, and clarifying meaning. We will give the children opportunities to respond to Time for Kids with both written and verbal communication. It will be important for the students to apply the knowledge they gain to show an understanding of national and world events. Reading Time for Kids will be only the first step toward analyzing and evaluating articles! This proposal will enable our fifth grade students to read, think, and talk about current events as they dramatically increase their knowledge of the country and world. Increased reading comprehension will result from readable, but challenging nonfiction text. This is an exciting opportunity for our students. Thank you for taking the time to read this proposal.