One of the core goals of The Juice is to be flexible and as user-friendly as possible for teachers and parents educating both in the classroom and at home. In a Covid-19 world, we understand that many classrooms have moved to part- or even full-time virtual learning. While The Juice is a great tool to bring to the physical classroom, it is an online platform and provides options to do fun, online, remote activities as a class. Our daily current events stories are shaped to teach critical thinking skills, but we also have designed The Juice to give students other skills in and outside of the classroom, such as building classroom community, strengthening vocabulary, and increasing media literacy.

We have put together some ways you can use The Juice in classroom activities. If you are teaching or instructing virtually, don’t worry—most of these activities can be done virtually, or can easily be changed to meet virtual needs. Keep reading for some creative ways to bring The Juice to your classroom today!

Bringing STEAM Life Hack Tricks in the Classroom

Each Juice newsletter includes a STEAM-related video. While some of these videos explain the history of certain places or events, many include science-based “life hack” and “magic or science” tricks. For instance, on Monday, April 12th’s Juice, we included a video instructing viewers on how they can make a speaker through an empty paper towel roll.

We recently interviewed a 6th-grade teacher who uses The Juice STEAM videos to start every class. She explained that the videos get students’ “motors running,” and give students ideas for activities they can easily try at home or in the classroom. She pairs the video with a discussion centered on how students could use the life hack video in their own daily life, or how they might solve the problem differently than the video’s solution. 

For a fun and engaging classroom activity, gather students into groups of 3-4 and assign them an experiment to recreate for the class. Our YouTube channel houses all of our STEAM-related videos if you want to give your students options to choose form (tip: look for the videos titled with “Life Hacks” or “Magic or Science”). For fun experiments to try, check out our videos on how to clean a penny with ketchup, freshen up shoes, and control a pinwheel with telekinesis. 

Students can take turns performing the experiment or life hack for their classmates, discussing how they went about the experiment and any challenges they faced along the way.

Make It Virtual

If you have a virtual classroom, invite students to pick a “life hack” or “magic or science” video to complete at home. They can either record a video of the experiment to play for their classmates, or you can schedule a student to perform an experiment live each day to start class.

Vocabulary Games/Quizzes

The Juice includes a “Fresh Word of the Day,” or a daily vocabulary word. We outlined a few different activities you can use to teach the daily Fresh Word in this blog post, but one fun way to incorporate our vocab is to write the word on the board and give students a point for each way they correctly use the vocab word that day. The great part about this game is that it can be done in-person or virtually! Repeat the game each day that you read through The Juice and discuss the Fresh Word of the Day, and keep a running track of which students have used appropriately used the Fresh Word of the Day.

Another way you can use the Fresh Word of the Day is to put the vocabulary word section of The Juice on the screen as a bell ringer activity, or an activity students do in the first few minutes when they enter or log in to class. Students can write down their guesses of what the word means based on the example of it used in a sentence. Whoever is the closest, wins!

Make a Mindmap at the End of the Week

After a week of reading The Juice current event stories, assign a mindmap activity for students to complete in order to reveal how different topics or stories relate or connected throughout the week.

As a class, come up with one central idea that was present throughout that week’s current events. Then, give students time to create a mindmap made up of branches, keywords, colors, and pictures based on that central idea, showing how it appeared throughout the week and the different contexts it showed up in. For example, if there was a week full of presidential updates, students could create a mindmap with “President Biden” as the central theme. Then, their mindmaps will branch off into other events or topics related to the president that occurred that week. This activity can be done in-person or virtually, but make sure to give students time online or in the class to share their mindmaps with one another!

For more ideas and examples of what mindmaps can look like, check out this website.

Visual Storytelling of a Current Event

After reading through The Juice, invite students to turn a current event story into a visual to better understand the written content they read that day. Decide on either one current event that each student will find an image for, or allow students to pick whichever current event they are most interested in that day. Give students the option to either find an image from the internet or create one of their own.

As students approach finding or creating a visual, they should consider the following:

• What did you think of as you thought of this story? Did any images or pictures come to mind?
• Who are the key figures in this story?
• What emotions did you feel when you read the story?
• How could an image help readers better understand the story?
• What’s an important takeaway from the story for readers?

When they complete the activity, have each student present their image, found or created. Ask students the following questions outlined in a previous Juice blog post:

• Where is this image from, if found from a source?
• Is the source reliable? How do you know?
• What made you select this visual?
• Is the image biased? Can images be biased?
• How does this image help readers’ understanding of the story?
• If you created the visual, what were you trying to communicate through the picture? 

Group Summaries of Current Events

If you don’t have time as a class to read through every current event story, try a group-instructional activity to help students practice their comprehension and communication skills. Students will also benefit from hearing about every current event that day, even if they weren’t able to personally read each one.

Break students into 5 groups, and assign each group one of the different stories that day. Instruct students to read through each story, and answer the following questions:

1. What is the central idea of the story?
2. Who is involved in this story (person, country, state, politicians, citizens)?
3. Write down 3-5 main ideas or points from the story.
4. Have you heard about this current event before today?
5. What is something we can take away from this story?

After students meet in their groups and complete the previous questions, invite each group to share their answers with the class. Students will benefit from learning from one another, and also from practicing their summary and presentation skills! Another advantage of this activity is that it can be done virtually. Students can be sent into break-out rooms in most virtual classrooms, where they can privately work, and the instructor can check in on groups to ensure they’re on track and don’t have questions before it’s time to meet as a class after.

The Juice

This is only the beginning of how The Juice can be used in different classroom activities! The Juice is a great tool to get creative with and can be shaped to the needs of your class, discipline, or lesson. If you have found a creative way to use The Juice, we would love to hear about it! Let us know how you use The Juice on our Facebook page, and you may be featured in a future blog!