First of all, I have used USA Today in the classroom with success with an exercise I made up called "phrasing." Small groups of ninth-grade students sit down with the newspaper, and we decide on an article to read.
The students take turns reading a paragraph, and I then ask the reader to pick one phrase from the paragraph that he or she read. An example of a phrase might be, "on the other side." Each of the students selects a phrase, and when we have about five phrases, they must be used by the group to write a paragraph that has nothing to do with the topic of the
article that they read. It is enjoyable to watch the hard thinking that goes into making up a paragraph that must be coherent and make sense from those phrases. Some of the resulting work is quite good, and very rarely do I have to intervene to be sure that it is coherent.
All of this also includes a peripheral discussion of the article itself and how it is topical for the day's news in the context of what is going on in the world.
Gerald A. Villa
Mojave High School
