Learning Areas: Number, Language Essential Skills Numeracy Problem Solving Communication Activity One: Temperatures Conduct a class survey to find out the following: how many households receive a daily newspaper how many households subscribe to or regularly purchase a magazine Make graphs to show the order of popularity of newspapers and magazines read by households. On the weather page of a newspaper, have each student select five cities from around the world and: be able to locate these cities on a map of the world record in graphic form the maximum and minimum temperatures for a period of a week find the average weekly temperature for each city calculate the difference in daily average temperature between each city and your local town/city Activity Two:Births and Deaths Have students calculate the number of births and deaths recorded in the newspaper during the period of a week. Using this information, will the circulation district of the newspaper have a negative or positive population growth over the period of a year? Calculate this figure. Activity Three: Letters to the Editor What is the average daily number of letters to the editor over a period of a week? Discuss and classify these letters into categories, eg sport, politics, environment, health … What statements can be made about what concerns the community most? What gender (male or female) writes the most letters to the newspaper? Is there any obvious correlation between gender of the writers and the categories of the letters? Activity Fou:r Magazine Topics Give out a selection of magazines to each group for analysis. Introduce the concept of specialist magazines such as motoring, fashion, travel, computers etc. and have students select a category for each magazine. Develop the idea of a 'target audience for each magazine. Challenge groups to identify the target audiences for their selection of magazines. What part does gender play in defining the target audience? What part does age play in defining the target audience? Activity Five: News/Features/Advertising Ratios and Relationships Focus on newspapers and have students measure and calculate the area of print per page. How many pages are there in the newspaper. What area of the newspaper is devoted to news (include temperature and television/radio info)? Calculate the area of the newspaper devoted to advertising. Can the students come up with a ratio of news to advertising? Have each student calculate the same ratio between advertising and articles in a magazine of their choice. Can they find any relationship between the magazine article and the advertising placed within or near the article? Why do they think that, in many cases, there is a close relationship? Do you have a lesson you would like to share with other teachers? Simply email us an attached Word, Works or PDF file and we will add it to our library. Don't forget to include your name and school so we can acknowledge your work. Click on the email icon below.