Iowa Ideas

Forever devising new ways to stimulate youthful imaginations, many U. S. teachers have introduced daily newspapers into their classrooms. Des Moines' two big sister dailies, the Register and the Tribune, recently offered Iowa teachers $500 in prizes for ideas on "How to Use the Daily Newspaper in the Schools." Out of the suggestions received, the Register & Tribune culled the best for publication in a 4O-page booklet.* By last week Iowa teachers, principals and professors had written in for some 7,500 copies.

Sample ideas:

P: Kindergarten and first-grade pupils, unable to read, are started on comic strips, lured on by such teasers as "Wouldn't you like to read the funnies' yourself without waiting for some one to read for you?"

P: A seventh-grade history class wrote, edited, hand-printed a newspaper made up from the big news stories of the Revolutionary War. Headlines: DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE IS SIGNED; WASHINGTON CAPTURES PRINCETON; CORNWALLIS SURRENDERS AT YORKTOWN. A geography class made a great map of the world, pinned the day's news stories on their points of origin.

P: One day a high-school class in literature dramatized the wedding of King Arthur as told in The Idylls of the King. Next day it dramatized a modern wedding as reported in the newspapers.

P: To teach a business class the mechanism of the stock market, each student was equipped with the daily financial sections and an imaginary $1,000 to speculate with. The teacher, acting as broker, required each of her charges to speculate on a 10% margin, change his holdings every other day. Soon she was able to sell most of them out.

* Similar booklets, less popularly compiled, are published by the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.