Newspapers

I was hooked on newspapers by age five. The old weekday Milwaukee Journal had a section called The Green Sheet. Printed on pale, green newsprint, it featured three pages of comic strips plus kids’ features, contests and human interest photos. One of my childhood mysteries was how my parents possibly could reach for the white parts of the paper first.

I was gradually drawn into more and more sections of the paper, and, by adulthood, I was a newspaper reader for life. Or perhaps I should say,”as long as newspapers exist”.

The beauty of a good paper is in its eclecticism. Even when I’m a week behind on the Times and I say to myself,”I’ll just scan each page for headlines”, I’m always drawn in.

Using the computer, I go directly to the information I want. In the paper, serendipity reigns. I do not wake up in the morning knowing I will read about the politics in Botswana, the genetics of polar bears and the architecture in Finland…but my paper can deliver all that and much more in a day.

I confess to being a chronic clipper of interesting articles, a trait my friends know well. Snail mail to a friend has longevity that a”forward”can’t match.

My paper is also a trove of creative inspiration. I developed several lesson plans for my middle schoolers this year with ideas that came as I was reading gallery reviews in my newspaper.

I must add that I use old newspapers to cover the tables in classrooms when we do messy art projects. To my delight, some kids always start reading the papers and want to keep reading. I go over, fold up the paper, hand it to them and say, “It’s yours to take home and finish”. That may be more significant than the day’s art project.

 

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1 thought on “Newspapers”

  1. Yes, the Green Sheet. Do they still have that? I loved it. Of course, it had the funnies. But my kids never got drawn in to the funnies in any newspapers we had here. I always get the local weekly paper, but I’ve had the available semi-local dailies only on an off. Off now, for a number of years. I liked reading the paper too much, too much time on stuff that wasn’t important, after I read the more important stuff. Of course, now I read the news on the ‘puter. The difference with that is that I can read news from all over and from several sides of an issue.

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