Research revealing the continued dominance of narrative texts in primary-grade classrooms, coupled with shifts in the American cultural and textual landscape, have prompted educational policy urging teachers to increase the variety of informational texts students read and the authenticity with which students use those texts. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate how one first-grade teacher scaffolded students’ meaningful engagement with a nontraditional classroom text, a local newspaper, through daily interactive read-alouds. Data sources including expanded field notes, transcripts of naturalistic observations, and teacher interviews were analyzed inductively using methods of constant comparison and discourse analysis. Purposefully selected topical episodes highlighted the characteristic of newspapers as dynamic texts that privilege real-time information. Analysis identified that the teacher scaffolded engagement through thoughtful selection of content, improvisation aimed at creating connections, acknowledgment of uncertainty, and positioning of students as members of the community of people who follow current events.
