Book Details

Writing the News: Practical newspaper-based writing activities, expanding on reporting and creative writing skills for Grades 5-7.

• Students read a wide range of texts with purpose, understanding and critical awareness.

• Students write for a range of purposes and in a range of forms, using conventions appropriate to purpose, audience and context. Using the Activities Writing the News is all about reading newspapers and writing for newspapers. What better way to
understand how a newspaper is written than to actually have fun writing part or all of it in class? The pages which follow include a variety of activities. Some involve comprehension, others involve writing, whilst others ask students to consider their own attitudes. This book can be used sequentially, working through the different parts of the newspaper, from news articles to competitions, and finishing with a whole class newspaper project. Alternatively, each activity stands alone – allowing you to focus on the specific parts of the newspaper appropriate for your teaching program. Many activities refer to ‘your daily newspaper’. In some areas there is only one daily, in others you may choose to focus on one, or may use this as an opportunity to compare and discuss the differences between various daily papers. Local weekly papers and weekend papers are also appropriate for most activities. In addition, most newspapers have websites which may be of use in lesson planning. As well as being ideal for media studies, the class newspaper task could be used to focus on a specific theme studied in other subject areas, with all sections of the class paper focusing on this theme in some way. A whole-class newspaper could also be the local paper for the town in a class novel, with all news reports and other content relating to the events of the novel in some way.

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