Black and white and read all over - including in schools

• Garfield Elementary School

Echo Press photo by Lynn Mounsdon Students in Garfield Elementary School paged through the Echo Press as part of the Newspaper in Education program.
• Osakis School

Echo Press photo by Lynn Mounsdon Working as a group, students in Jennifer Halvorson's 6th grade class in Osakis pored over the newspaper and answered questions about the front-page stories.

Talk about it

Extra, extra! Read all about it.

Young people are doing just that in their classrooms through the Newspapers in Education (NIE) program.

NIE promotes literacy efforts and places newspapers in schools to supplement learning.

The Echo Press works with local schools, freely supplying teachers with issues of the newspaper, which are used for class lessons and instruction.

The Echo Press distributes about 675 issues of the paper each week to schools in Alexandria, Osakis, Garfield and Evansville. The newspapers are funded through the Echo Press’ annual “Strike Out Illiteracy” bowling tournament and by area business sponsors.

Teachers use the donated newspapers to teach reading and comprehension, story structure, grammar, vocabulary, current events and more.

Here’s an example of an NIE project conducted in Jennifer Halvorson’s 6th grade class in Osakis:

Students were asked to read a newspaper article on the front page and then as a group, answer a series of questions.

They then used their answers to make a poster, which addressed the five “Ws” of a newspaper story – who was in the article, where it took place, when it happened, what the article was about and why it was news.

After that, each group gave a short presentation using its poster to tell about the article the group read.

The students were graded on neatness of their poster and creativity.

Because of the success and popularity of the NIE program, there are more teachers who want to use this resource than there are newspapers available. Businesses or organizations can remedy the problem by contributing to the program.

For more information about NIE or how to support it, contact Lynn Mounsdon at (320) 763-3133.

Tags: local news, newspapers in education, news, reading, newspapers, schools, education, nie