My husband and I are often sitting in the family room reading the news on the iPad - we do not get a traditional newspaper anymore. Every now and then (usually in the USA Today app.) I stumble across a story that will interest one or both of my kids. Last week I wrote about the Silly Bandz article that interested everyone. At lunch yesterday my daughter asked me if there were any interesting new articles to read. I looked online and did find a couple in my regular news sites, but that prompted me to do a Google search for "kids news stories". I'd like to share what I came up with - I am thinking that this homeschool year we will start a "current events time" while we are eating lunch, using material found on these sites.
DOGO News is a really fun news site for kids. The coolest feature is that, once you or your children are reading the articles, certain vocabulary words are in a different color, and if you click on that word it brings up the definition. I LIKE that! We poked around on DOGO for a while and found this article about surfing mice. After reading it we could then watch this video -- don't know how "newsworthy" it is, but we did laugh!
Another site which is a more obvious choice is TIME for Kids. While a lot of the site is designed to go along with the TIME for Kids magazine, much of the content on the site is stand alone and interesting. We will probably grab lots of current events and activities from this site as well.
The final site for today is Scholastic Kids. I must admit I'm tempted to order the physical newspaper for my kids because it looks very good, but we'll just enjoy the online content to save money. Miss B's favorite article from this site was about a young artist who raised money for animals affected by the oil spill in the Gulf.
Just like adults know it is important to keep up with the daily news, I want my children to know this as well. The most educated people I know are those who take the time to read and read daily, and read from a variety of sources and viewpoints.
I hope these sites inspire you to start talking about current events with your children!