Dated: Saturday, February 25, 2017

By Ms. Zeenat Fatima – Hfs Primary Section

Encouraging students to read and write in ways that allows them to make sense of real language in real contexts is more likely to help them develop the skills necessary to become avid readers and writers. Reading is a very enriching and relaxing way to enhance language skills and informative as well. Language learners are in the unique position of being able to learn and absorb useful information from any literature that they read.

“There is always something new to learn, be it fiction or non-fiction. Reading stimulates the mind, and makes one smarter.”

To encourage students to read, it is imperative to surround them with a variety of reading material, including children’s magazines and newspapers. Children’s magazines expose them to diverse types of writing, from fiction and nonfiction to poems.

Reading English newspaper not only improves reading skills but also helps create awareness about this book stemmed from a contest named “How to Use the Newspaper in the Classroom,” in the Milwaukee Journal. Successful teaching methods contributed by teachers made up the majority of the book, and as a result, the book became popular among teachers.

There are many events throughout the twentieth century that also helped develop the prevalent use of newspapers we see in classrooms today.

Young World is an age appropriate newspaper for children. It has drawings and stories contributed by children. It also has News Update Section in the end. There are small articles and reviews of books. It has many poems written by children. It also contains new words in the Word of the Week Corner for children to improve their vocabulary.

Even if children just read the magazine and newspaper and enjoy their content; they will be learning new vocabulary, sentence structures and common quotes.

Here are some activities we can do with English magazines and newspapers that will help improve their reading and language skills:

• Picture Description: Most magazines have a lot of pictures. Choose some pictures and ask them to describe these.
• Picture Stories: Students organize ideas and information for creative writing. The aim is to use pictures to tell a story.
• Summarize and Discuss the Articles: Ask them to read an article. Have a conversation about it. It will be a great way to practice their understanding of the article and conversation skills. Through this activity students effectively skim and scan for information.
• Article Writing: Give the students a headline, and ask them to write a similar article with a separate headline.
• Report/Review Writing: Ask students to read and summarize an article or story that interests them and then report back to the class about it. List difficult words or phrases on the board.

So, the most effective teaching and learning tool to introduce in the classrooms is the multidimensional newspaper and this should be incorporated early on in the educational framework too for optimised outcomes in’sha’Allah.