News Literacy in the 4th Grade

Every day, each of us is bombarded with information.  How do we decide what is true? How do we know what to think? The fourth graders at Alexandria Country Day School spent the past couple of months in library class contemplating these questions and working on developing the critical thinking skills they need to be smarter information consumers and, ultimately, better citizens.

We started the project by considering whether we even cared about all this outside information. Students spent a weekend in a "news blackout"-- with no access to TV, print, radio or online news.  Students wrote about feeling "unprepared."  One student talks about why she did not like the blackout.

We then journeyed into the various "neighborhoods" where information lives.  Our team of information seekers, trying to write a report on frogs, wanted to know how long frogs live.  They received the latest score of the Frogs vs. Wildcats basketball game in the  Entertainment Neighborhood.  They were offered various frog delicacies (including "frog juice with just a hint of lemon") from Frog-o-Mania in the Advertising  Neighborhood. They found reliable general frog information in the Reference Neighborhood and the latest information on frog populations in the News Neighborhood.  The students spent quite a bit of time in the Reference Neighborhood while working on a natural disaster research project, before traveling on for an in-depth visit to News.

We read news. We watched news. We looked for opinion words and factual words. The students considered whether the articles and broadcasts were telling us where the information was coming from.  Did we consider that source or evidence reliable? Was the journalist independent and accountable? 

Then it was time for the press conference.  Armed with press passes and carefully planned questions in their reporter's notebooks, the 4th graders got the scoop from the Head of School, the Athletic Director, the Technology Director, the middle school science fair winners, and other important newsmakers around ACDS.

Students wrote, edited and recorded their stories for the first episode of The Bobcat News.  Our critical thinking didn't stop there.  We watched and critiqued our own performance.  Did we use opinion words correctly? (Sometimes.) Were we as independent as we should have been? (Not always.)  How reliable were our sources?  (Pretty good.)

News and information literacy will be critical skills for these fourth graders as they continue through ACDS and determine how they know what they know, who will decide what they think, and how they will make convincing and credible arguments to others.  One student wrote, when "I am getting information I have to think about [it] and decide whether I can trust it or not."

Elizabeth Lockwood, the Library Media Specialist at ACDS, developed this unit for the fourth graders in conjunction with the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University.