The Daily News is a whole group activity designed to provide practice in concepts of print for the students. Each day the news begins by the teacher writing the day and date on a piece of chart paper. As this is written the children are encouraged to participate as the teacher askes a variety of questions and makes comments as she writes the chart. The comments will vary throughout the year, depending on what the teacher wants to emphasize and what the students are ready to learn. Here is an example of what a typical lesson might sound like at the beginning of the school year:
"Class, let's write the word Today. /t/, /t/, what letter would today begin with?" (Class answers "t") Teacher writes "T" on the chart and comments on how it is a capital letter because it is the first word of the sentence.Teach writes"o" and says "Does anyone know what we have written so far?" (Class answers "To"). "Yes, we have written "to" so far. You are becoming such good readers! /d/, /d/, what will we write next?" (Class answers "d") Teacher writes "d" and proceeds to make the next sound long/a/. (Children respond "a" ) The teacher writes it down. "Now we can't hear the last letter, y", the teacher says as it is written down. "Now we will leave a space. What word will we write next?" (Children shout out "is!", i-s, "is!") and the teacher praises this correct response and writes it down. "Now we are going to write a new word, so let's leave a space. The next word is Monday. /m/, /m/, what letter do we write?" (The children respond "m") "What kind of m?" (Children respond, "capital!") The teacher writes it and asks why it is capital. (Some students answer "because it is a name") "Okay, good, let's keep going...o (teacher writes), n (teacher writes), d (teacher writes), a (teacher writes), y (teacher writes). Teacher covers "Mon" and asks children what it says. ("day!" the children answer). "Now we will add a comma, which means take a breath. Hmmmmm....we are out of space on this line. What shall we do?" (Children respond, "Go to the next line.") The lesson continues in this way as we write the month, day and year. The second sentence of the news varies throughout the year, but it is always about the day's leader. Some "themes" we have used are:
The leader is....
(leader's name) can ......
(leader's name) went to ....
(leader's name)'s favorite color is....
(Mr./Miss last name) likes...
(Mr./Miss last name) said, "quote of choice".
Children can write whatever they choose.
After the news is written, the children read through it as the teacher points to each word. Then a letter that is repeated several times in the news is chosen and students come up and circle the letter. A word is chosen and students come up and underline the word in each place it occurs. Later in the year, the students take over writing themselves each day when they are leader. They really like this as they write with the support of the rest of the class. The last time through, the leader wrote the news ahead of time with the assistance of a student of his/her choice. The student points to the news as the class reads and decides what letters and words to focus on. The student calls on other students to circle and underline.
Through this variety of topics children are introduced to capitalization, punctuation, spacing, left to right progression, top to bottom progression, recognizing letters and sight words, letter formation, letter sounds, recognizing first and last names of classmates, etc.
This lesson needs to be kept upbeat and quick to hold the student's attention. The skills are repeated on a daily basis, so there is no need to belabor any individual concept. As students grow and develop in literacy, you will want to gloss over things that they are familiar with and move on to other concepts.
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