These words appear in this week's issue of react: residents, overcast, feat, devastation, intimidated, riveted, demoralized, persuade, consequences, enviable, valedictorian, prestigious, rebelliousness, safeguard, minors, overcast.
Have your students find the words in react and define them, either by using the context or a dictionary. Challenge them to use as many as possible in a short story or let them select five and identify the root word and the prefix or suffix.
Hollywood's perception of life on Mars has changed greatly in the last 100 years.
Students can have fun " morphing " into aliens with this assignment. Ask them to imagine themselves as aliens visiting Earth on a scouting expedition. It is their job to create a report to send to the home planet describing life and society on Earth. They can work in small groups to prepare the report, but should only use react and the newspaper as sources. Have them look for information about what people on Earth wear, eat, do for fun or work, etc. The report they send back may include both written descriptions and illustrations they cut out or draw. Have each group prepare a report and brief oral presentation of their conclusions about life on Earth.
Using the statistics in the poll, challenge students to figure out how many students said yes and how many students said no. Then, have them use those same percentages to find how many students would have said yes and no if the poll were taken in your class.
Marie Fleming, 18, is taking action to stamp out smoking in her community by teaching younger children about the dangers of smoking and teaching her peers how to organize anti-smoking events and activities.
Ask students to skim the newspaper to find problems in their communities that they would be willing to devote time to solving. Discuss their choices as a class. List choices on the board and have the students rank them in order of importance.
A good follow-up to this lesson is to encourage students to enter the react Take Action Awards competition on Page 11. The react Take Action Awards are for teenagers ages 12 to 17 who have made a major contribution to their school, community, nation or the world. Students can find a cause or problem in the newspaper or within the community that could use their help. After identifying the problem, they should plan how to best work at solving it. Or, if they are already involved in a worthwhile cause, encourage them to enter the competition by writing an essay about what they are doing.
The long winning streak of the Bulldogs high school football team in Berwick, Pa., continues. Some of the players and community detail how they feel.
This feature story includes many homonyms. With this activity, you can get students to better understand the use of these words that sound alike but are spelled differently. Have them find and underline each of these homonyms in the story: feat, weights, no, to, blew, role, here, their, not. Ask them to write a sentence for each word as it is used in the article. Then have them write its homonym and a sentence for that. Finally, have students scan the newspaper to find five more examples of homonyms.* react journal prompt of the week
If your students write in a journal and occasionally need help thinking of topics, the react journal prompt of the week will provoke thought. After reading this story, have students imagine they are on the Bulldogs team and have lost a game. Have them write a journal entry detailing how they feel and why.
Here is a brief listing/summary of some videos students may enjoy renting.
Have students check out the movie listings in the newspaper for some other entertainment offerings. Ask them to categorize the movies listed by type under these headings; Lovey Dovey , Thrills and Chills, Laugh Riot, Super Sleuths, Sci - Fi Adventure, Serious Stories.
Prince William of England attends private school but rebels a bit by wearing sneakers!
After reading about William, ask students to imagine that they have been assigned to be William's host for a day-long visit to your area. Have them plan a full day's activities, using the entertainment section of the newspaper. Ask them to write the plan as a schedule with appropriate allotments of time for each activity.
Get to know "Weird Al" Yankovic , a musician with a wry sense of humor who writes and performs parodies of popular songs.
Read with your class the article about "Weird Al" and then let your students get creative by writing their own parodies of famous song titles. Have them write a list of five songs they like and then write parodies for each of the titles. Here is an example; Sheryl Crow's hit, "If It Makes You Happy" might be parodied with the song title, "If It Makes You Hungry." Here are the names of some currently popular songs to get them started: "Head Over Feet," "Come On Ride the Train," "I Love You Always Forever," "Down," "It's All Coming Back to Me Now," "Counting Blue Cars," "Keep Their Heads Ringin '."
This article is an interview and each new topic is introduced with its own subhead (small headline). Have students choose an interesting, short article from the newspaper and write a subhead for each paragraph introducing a main idea.
Here is a character with a unique excuse for not having homework ready!
Ask students to read the strip and then choose a comic strip character from your newspaper. Have them draw or write a comic or story as if that character did not have homework ready to hand in. Suggest that students come up with outrageous homework excuses. You may want to have them brainstorm some really wild ones and write them on the board.
react receives mail, e-mail, phone calls and faxes from around the United States and the world. These are featured in ask anything (page 3) and our voices (page 14). Likewise, teens are featured in stories throughout the issue from various places.
Have your students list all of the cities, states and countries noted in this week's issue of react and plot them on maps. Direct students to the newspaper's weather map, and have them list the temperatures for each that they find. Ask them to determine the percentage difference between the lowest and highest temperature. Have your students identify the U.S. city/state farthest from yours and then plan a road trip, calculating miles, picking the best route, listing what to pack for the weather they might experience, etc.