What To Do With Extra Classroom Magazines

Do you have extra Scholastic News Magazines lying around your classroom?

I hoard save Scholastic News magazines because I just love them and can’t imagine discarding them. However, we just never get to all of them and I always have a big pile by the end of the year.

Well, I finally buckled down and thought of some ways to use them!

Non-fiction Text Features

Go through old magazines and cut out examples of text features. The big teacher versions are especially great for this.

Tape those examples onto chart paper and, after introducing text features to your class with books (you’ll want to do this activity after you have had several discussions about text features), go through each example on the chart and ask kids to tell you what that text feature is and how it helps the reader. Label as you go.

It’s ok if you don’t find examples of all text features. Make sure you have the ones children will most likely encounter in their magazines and books: headings, labels/diagrams, bold words, photographs, captions. You can discuss new ones as they come up: charts, maps, ‘power words’ (vocabulary), timelines, etc.

There are a few text features you won’t find in these magazines (table of contents, glossary, index), so make sure to cover these during your study.

After labeling your poster, you can have students work with a partner to find text features in your extra student magazines (if you’ve been holding onto them for years like me, you will have plenty!).

They can cut the examples out and together you can tape them to the corresponding poster. Afterward, discuss the posters and how these text features helped them understand the text. **For older grades, you can have them create their own mini-posters, showing different examples of text features.

Of course, you can then have them read their informational books and find the text features in those as well. Ask them to write how they helped them understand.

As we read informational texts, we often discuss main idea and details. Read my blog post on helping your students identify the main idea and details: Teaching Main Idea and Details

You can find the graphic organizers on this page in my Main Idea and Details bundle.

A few more ideas…

• Use book order catalogs to sort fiction/ non-fiction books, author’s purpose, or make a wishlist.
• I always keep an extra full set for a sub. They’re pretty self-explanatory so no lesson plans needed!
• Send them home! Some kids would love to have extra ones to play school at home.
• Have kids write their own captions for photos.

• Collect new vocabulary words in a notebook.

• Pick an article and identify the main idea and details.

• Think of alternate headings.

• Have kids label them with post-it notes.

For my blog post chock full of labeling ideas, click here: Labeling for Emergent Writers

Maybe one day I will actually fulfill my dream of creating task cards with specific scavenger-hunt type questions to go with each edition. But in the meantime, I will let them go.

Do you have extra magazines you’ve saved over the years? How do you use (or plan to use) them? Comment below to share your ideas!