Imagine that someone from the local newspaper wanted you to write an article about a big event happening in your school that will give digital devices to all students. The newspaper wants a student’s perspective of how this will impact digital learning.
- What’s the first step you’d take in writing the article? (Answers will vary but may include brainstorming, drafting, and gathering sources.)
- If you’re going to write an article, you first have to know the facts about your story. What types of trusted sources might you use? (Answers will vary but may include interviewing the donors of the devices, interviewing school staff who requested the donation, interviewing teachers to ask how the devices will help learning, interviewing students to ask how it will impact them, etc.)
Gathering information and evidence—whether it’s an interview, eyewitness testimony, factual information, or video footage of an event—is an important part of news and journalism. Let’s watch a video about how reporters gather information and craft their stories.
Share this video with your students [4:07; stop at 3:44]:
How does a story become the news?
- Why is it important for news reporters to use sources and evidence for the stories they tell? (Using evidence and good sources allows reporters to show their credibility, it shows the news reports are built on facts rather than speculation, it shows the journalists and news sources can be trusted to report real stories, etc.)
Today, we’re going to explore something else that people might want evidence for: Is there evidence that Jesus is the promised Messiah, the Savior that—for hundreds of years—the Jewish people waited for? In our effort to gather that information, we’re going to gather the evidence of Old Testament prophecies, and see if they match up with the life of Jesus. He’s our “suspect” for the role of Messiah.
Let’s examine the evidence presented by the prophet Zechariah, who predicted key facts about the Messiah 500 years before Jesus was born. Does the information about Jesus match the Savior that Zechariah wrote about?
