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From a speach made at Adult Basis Education/GED Conference, Appleton, Wisconsin
Sponsored by Wisconsin Technical College System, October 23, 2008

Using The Key Newspaper as a Curriculum Tool
Presented by Ginny Balistreri, Editor, The Key Newspaper, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Good Afternoon: My name is Ginny Balistreri. I am the Editor of The Key Newspaper and Project Manager of The Key’s Readers as Writers Contest. This is my colleague, Janet Nortrom, who develops the lesson plans for each issue of The Key. Janet is a literacy instructor and is very active in pre-college education in Milwaukee and throughout Wisconsin. We both represent Milwaukee Area Technical College.

Before we begin, we would like to thank Peggy Meyers, Mark Johnson and the Wisconsin Technical College System for inviting us to present at this conference. Most of all, we would like to thank you for joining us today and for your interest in The Key.

That’s as good a segue as they come...so let’s get back to The Key Newspaper. How many of you currently subscribe to The Key? Those of you who are familiar with it, do you use the lesson plans or the articles as part of your curriculum? Why or why not? Would a couple of you be willing to comment?

The Key is a great way to not only teach reading and comprehension, as well as other subjects, but also to help your students become better informed citizens.

We have a lot to cover in our one-hour presentation, so let’s get started.

Mark and Peggy Meyers asked me to give you some background on The Key. I plan to give you some history interspersed with some ideas on using The Key. So pay close attention.

Milwaukee Area Technical College has been producing the Key Newspaper and Readers as Writers contest for nearly 21 years with an Adult Education and Family Literacy Grant administered through the Wisconsin Technical College System. We also get printing support from our long-time partner, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The Journal and its parent company, Journal Communications, have been with us since the project’s inception in 1988. The Journal gives us the paper and printing and allows us to use their original copyrighted articles at no charge.

We produce 11 issues of the paper per year. We don’t presume to be a real newspaper. We’re not breaking any news in this monthly publication. However, we design The Key as a curriculum tool for students in Adult Basic Education, GED, HSED, ESL and adult correctional education programs in the state. Each issue comes with lesson plans written by an instructor from our Pre-College Division. That’s where Janet comes in. We’ve been fortunate to have Janet helping us in this capacity for about the past 4 or 5 years.

Because we publish monthly, The Key is a combination of news and features that have some longevity...commonly referred to in the newspaper business as having “legs.”

News items focus on state, national, and international news, which we adapt to 4th through 8th grade reading levels. The content comes from the Journal Sentinel and a variety of news media, with their permission. The articles are rewritten by a Key Newspaper staff of retired and free-lance journalists. We do not include any articles on criminal activities. We avoid local news, unless it has an impact on the rest of Wisconsin, such as a regional hike in sales taxes, or issues related to Lake Michigan and the environment.

Feature articles are on health, financial literacy, parenting, jobs, civics, and culture. We sometimes include family literacy book reviews. We also cover Wisconsin sports.

All content is selected in consultation with our Advisory Board of statewide literacy instructors. We also get advice from our MATC Pre-College Division. We try as best as possible to link content to what is going on in your adult literacy classrooms, and we pay very close attention to comments and recommendations from teachers and tutors who use our publication and are kind enough to call and write us with their ideas.

We also take our lead from the State Board. The past couple of years, each issue included a feature on health, which as you know, is part of the State’s Adult Literacy initiatives. In past years, we’ve focused on STEM careers and financial literacy at the request of the State. Because financial literacy is such an important issue, we continue to include financial literacy articles along with health articles in every issue.

When our advisory board and I choose our content, we look for news and features that can bring up questions or link to classroom activities in reading, reading comprehension, math, soft job skills, science, culture, geography, chart reading, government and citizenship, critical thinking, and, as we said before, health and financial literacy. For example, Thanksgiving is approaching. We might do an article that explains the history of the holiday aimed at our ELL students and provide a pumpkin pie recipe as a sidebar. The recipe provides opportunities for Janet to develop activities around math and measurements. For example, how would you double or triple the recipe?...How many pints to a quart, etc.

We use many devices in the layout and copy to encourage students to read The Key. Articles are in 12-point, easy-to-read type. We limit stories to a maximum of 3 columns and break up stories with subheads that describe what’s coming next. Headlines tend to be very direct and forthright. We rarely get clever with them, although we did a recent story on the orbiting space station’s toilet problems. The headline said something like Urine Trouble (spelled u-r-i-n-e). Janet jumped on that and wrote some questions on the use of “play on words.”

We try to keep colloquialisms to a minimum. We tend to use simple, active sentences. We discourage the use of compound sentences, sentences that begin with a preposition, and sentences that begin with “And,” or “But.” However, they do slip in, because we know those variations on sentence structure make for good writing.

How can this benefit you in your classroom? You can use the simple sentences to ask your students to identify the parts of the sentence – the verbs, nouns, pronouns, etc. If your students are learning punctuation and how to write grammatically, you can ask them to combine two short sentences linked by the word “and” to create a compound sentence. You can also demonstrate how to punctuate the new sentence for your students. So in addition to reading the content of the article, the reader gets to learn something about writing, grammar and punctuation.

We try to build vocabulary with The Key. When new words are introduced in a story, we define them in the sentence that follows, or in parentheses, or with a synonym. You can point these devices out to your students as you introduce them to new words. We keep paragraphs short – two to three sentences.

We also strive to include the gist of the article – the who, what, when, where, and how –in the first few paragraphs so that you and your lower level readers can concentrate on a small section of the story and understand what it is about.

We avoid contractions and hyphenated words to keep reading levels at a minimum. But as you introduce these concepts to your students, you might find it helpful to extract paragraphs from The Key and have your students create contractions and identify where words can be broken. Although we avoid jargon, it sometimes finds its way into sports stories, where sports expression are sometimes universal, but still need to be explained. You can use these examples to illustrate how some words are used to mean different things and that some of these words are distinctly cultural.

We use lots of pictures to enhance a story, and sometimes we use a picture and captions to tell the entire story. A story within a picture caption can help new readers in a couple of ways. It can help you give your students ways to identify and relate words to pictures.

We also try to incorporate charts to illustrate information in the story and to help you teach the reader how to interpret them. We often include simple crossword puzzles, word finds, and math puzzles in The Key along with their answers. You can let your students work independently to solve the puzzles, work one-on-one with them to solve the puzzles, or instruct a group of students to solve the puzzles in order to create team building skills.

Occasionally we borrow an easy-to-understand political cartoon from the Journal Sentinel that humorously describes a serious issue. Experts say that cartoons and comics can teach simple words and ideas. Political cartoons can be many levels higher, but you can use them to introduce the concept of “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Our preference would be to have shorter stories and more white space, but the print surface of the paper changed with new printing equipment at the Journal Sentinel. Twelve articles that once fit into 8 pages now fit into 12. So we’re very conscious that new readers need more white space and that we need to do a better job of shortening articles to provide it. We’re always interested in your feedback on matters like this.

For higher level readers, nearly all of the stories include a Web site to research additional information. You can turn these Web sites into lessons on Internet searches, keyboarding, and research techniques.

The Key Newspaper and its corresponding lesson plans are distributed to more than 12,000 readers in over 350 literacy programs throughout Wisconsin, including the pre-college divisions of the WTCS colleges, and Wisconsin correctional institutions. We also provide the newspaper to alternative education programs serving young adults, and programs that serve adults with brain injuries and other learning disabilities.

The newspaper is also available on a Web site – www.keynews.org, which has been up and running for the past 8 or 10 years. It was incorporated to teach keyboarding and Internet search skills. But it might be helpful to you too, because all of the articles from the past 10 or 12 years are archived on the site. If you want to develop a resource packet of health care information to share with your students, they are easily accessible on our Web site.

Now if you’re not impressed by this next announcement, I don’t know what will impress you. The Key Newspaper and Web site have been endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education and the site is recipient of a coveted LINC award, which means we are a preferred literacy site. This has enabled us to actually go global with The Key. We now have literacy programs that are using the on-line version in New York, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, Canada, Australia, England, and Norway, to name a few.

I recently “Googled” our Web site, and found about 100 endorsements of The Key from literacy groups across the country, including federal agencies. I was most surprised to find an endorsement from China as well!

In case you are not familiar with it, we conclude each academic year with The Key Readers as Writers Contest. The contest gives you and your students in Wisconsin literacy programs a chance to demonstrate how they have progressed over the year. The winning entries and 2nd place Honorable Mentions are chosen by a panel of professional writers. We publish the best entries in a collection of essays, poems and short stories. The book is added to the permanent collection of the Milwaukee Public Library. We also add it to our permanent collection at Milwaukee Area Technical Colleges. It’s pretty impressive to go to the Milwaukee Public Library or one its branches and find your composition listed in the card catalog.

If you and your students are not participating in the Readers as Writers contest, we hope you will consider doing so. We get about 250-350 entries each year. The winners are at varying levels in their educational development.

We recognize the honorees and their instructors at an Awards ceremony in May at the Milwaukee Public Library. It is a family event where we can instill a strong literacy message to other members of the new readers’ families. We invite local published authors to give the keynote address. And the evening concludes with the awarding of certificates of achievement.

As I mentioned earlier, The Key Readers as Writers contest is an excellent way to demonstrate the progress your students have made in reading and writing over the course of the year. I’m told that it has encouraged many at-risk adult students to stay in school. I’ve also heard many stories about winners of the contest who were inspired to work harder once they were published and were motivated enough to transition into postsecondary education after finishing their GEDs. Sometimes it just takes a little ego boost.

Well, all of this is interesting, you say, but how else can I make The Key Newspaper work in my classroom?

I gave you examples earlier of how we might incorporate history, math and measurements into a lesson plan with an article describing the origins of Thanksgiving and a recipe for, say, pumpkin pie. That pumpkin pie recipe also can be used to teach sequencing. Those are pretty obvious examples.

But newspapers – whether they’re The Key, the Cap Times, Racine Journal Times, or Appleton Post-Crescent – offer your students a multitude of interesting and applied learning opportunities and ways to make your job of teaching a little easier and perhaps more interesting.

Janet and I reproduced a couple of handouts for you that include some additional ideas. We hope you will take them home and review them and use them for inspiration in finding ever more clever ways to use the current events in newspapers to teach reading and comprehension. Janet is going to talk some more about the lesson plans she prepares, and how you can use them.

But first, let’s look at some of the theories behind the use of newspapers in your classrooms.

In one of your handouts, the writer cites a 1985 study by Fenholt in which she contends that some of the elementary reading materials used to teach reading to adults can be embarrassing for some adults to use. Think of the English language learner in your ESL classes. Often these students have advanced degrees in their native countries and can be offended using The Pokey Puppy to adapt to English. They are not alone. The same egos that cause an illiterate adult to hide their inability to read, might find it offensive to learn to read from an alphabet Golden Book.

Fenholt contends that newspapers can be a more comfortable instructional fit for some adults to use, even if you use just the comics or the advertising supplements from your local paper to help your student memorize words, learn abbreviations, or to promote an understanding of coupons, sales and price comparisons.

Fenholt built her supposition from case studies in the 1998 United Nations publication, “Newspapers in Adult Education: A Sourcebook,” which noted that many countries around the world promote newspaper-education partnerships to improve the education of their adult citizens. The case studies further justified that newspapers can make adult education more attractive and effective, while also helping to make the new readers better informed citizens.

We learn, too, that newspapers can be used to teach new adult readers the basics of reading -- from alphabetizing to more advanced levels of comprehension such as contextual understanding, reasoning, and critical thinking.

More than a few times, I have had teachers write to me to say that their students wouldn’t consider picking up a mainstream newspaper, but will read The Key cover to cover. Their students even will tackle articles beyond their tested reading level because The Key is not intimidating.

Perhaps it is the 8- or 12-page tabloid sized paper that makes it seem less daunting to pick up, or the 12-point type, or the column widths that make it easier for the new reader’s eyes to move across the page, and down.

Our response is that we try to offer something for everyone in adult literacy. We made a decision with the State Board some years ago to offer a variety of news and devices to reach all levels. But our articles would range primarily between 4th and 8th grade. So I am well aware that many of you feel that there is not enough in the Key for your beginning readers.

But we contend that you can still make the Key work for even the newest readers and English Language Learners.

For example: You can use The Key to help your students find and identify letters to learn the alphabet and to put letters together to identify simple words and phrases. I mentioned before that it can be particularly effective using picture captions to help the reader recognize words that relate to the images on the page.

You can use the first few paragraphs of an article – the health articles are often written at the lowest reading level – to read to your student so that she becomes familiar with the sound and structure of the language. This exercise models good reading, especially if you read a phrase and then let the reader read the next phrase. This also teaches the new reader to read in phrases, rather than single words so that they begin to break the habit of reading slowly.

New low-level readers will also benefit from reading just the headlines, subheads, internal quotes, introduction lines and photo captions. This teaches scanning, which experts say is an excellent reading habit to develop, and helps to draw on background knowledge and add new information to previous knowledge. Students can’t read what they don’t know.

Also use the headlines, subheads, internal quotes, introduction lines, and photo captions to begin to introduce punctuation, grammar, and sentence development. As the reader progresses, ask them to find the who, what, when, and where of the article. This will help them identify key words and to develop comprehension skills.

That reminds me that a few months ago, I won’t tell you when, I unintentionally sent an unedited version of an article to the keyline artist. The issue had to go to press immediately, and I didn’t catch all of the grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors in the article until the printed newspaper was out and a tutor at one of the literacy councils called me to tell me what a sloppy job I had done. I was mortified, but saw this as a learning opportunity for our readers. I added a few questions to Janet’s lesson plan that we posted to the Web site. I asked the readers to find the errors in the story and correct them with the help of their teachers.

So there’s another idea. Have your students play editor and have them look for errors in The Key (heaven forbid) or in other printed material. I guarantee that you will always find something…a misspelling, the misplacement of a comma or semi-colon, a grammar error. Whether they find some or not, your student will be reinforcing and gaining confidence in their knowledge of correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

Sports stories are great ways to teach math, especially percentages. There also are good math examples in weather stories.

Periodically we do weather stories to prepare new arrivals for Wisconsin’s frigid winters. The articles focus on how to dress and how to prepare for winter. We always include a chart to convert temperatures from Celsius to Fahrenheit and wind chill factors to temperatures. A terrific math exercise that is not likely to insult your adult students’ maturity is to have them chart temperatures over a period of a week or month. Everyone likes to keep track of the weather. Also have them display the information in a different chart format.

Wisconsin has its share of difficult city names to learn to spell and pronounce. Names like Mukwonago and Waukesha must be very difficult for English Language Learners in particular to tackle. To build on the weather tracking exercise, you might give your students a list of two or five cities in the state. Have them locate and mark the cities on a map. Then have them track, compare and contrast the temperatures of the different cities over a week or a few days. They can use the Internet, other newspapers, or the weather channel to get temperatures for the other cities. I think you teachers might call that interdisciplinary learning.

Our last three issues of The Key have been dominated by articles related to the Presidential election in November. We stressed the importance of voting and described voter registration requirements. We outlined the important issues about the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain and provided questions in our lesson plans to encourage students to compare and contrast their positions, and to think critically about where they position themselves on the issues. We also talked about the financial crisis, explained in simple terms how it came about, and illustrated how the impact trickles down to all segments of the population.

Government agencies are named and described by duties, along with political parties, and government positions.

As instructors, the articles and related information offer an opportunity to develop a wide range of reinforcing classroom activities. For example, have your class discuss the candidates’ positions on a particular issue, like immigration or the economy. Or suggest they write a paragraph explaining why they agree or disagree with a particular position. Assign them the task of identifying their district voting place and help them identify the local government entity or Internet site that can provide them with an accurate location.

To introduce higher levels of interpretation or application, you can instruct your students to look at political ads and identify their target audiences, such as women or NRA members, etc.

The final step in the process of using The Key is to introduce your students to their local daily newspaper. Their knowledge shouldn’t end with The Key. As I said, earlier, we do not presume to be a real newspaper. Another of our goals is to get our students and readers to become informed, involved citizens. The easiest way to do this is to get them to read newspapers and newsmagazines, and to become critical consumers of information. Not the Entertainment Tonight news, but the Meet the Press variety. By doing so, we preserve the most basic tenets of democracy. I don’t recall who said this, but I believe it:

“The educated mind is a liberated mind, and a liberated mind, free to think and create, is the engine of any vital and prosperous society.”

Thank you again for your time. If you would like to subscribe to The Key, please complete the form on the back of your survey and return it to us as you leave. Or write to me at balistrv@matc.edu, and we will add you and your students to our mailing list. Remember, newspaper subscriptions are for Wisconsin literacy programs only. However, The Key is available on-line at www.keynews.org for everyone else. You are free to copy it.