Transcript

At the beginning of the year, my class created a classroom newspaper. This was part of the community building in the classroom; I wanted all the students to work on something collaborative. We started by looking at newspapers themselves. I gave small groups newspapers and asked them to identify the different parts of a newspaper. Students circled things like the headline, the byline, the columns, the photo. Of course, at the time they didnt have the vocabulary byline, but they would circle the reporters name and together we put the newspaper on the board and we made a list of all of the features of the newspaper and then we talked about what the names of those features were. They would circle the headline, and I would tell them "Thats the headline." They circled the reporters name and I said, "Thats the byline." 

Once we knew what went into a newspaper article, we moved on to writing a newspaper article. Our first step was to write one collaboratively. We used something called the Inverted Pyramid format, which I found on the  ReadWriteThink  website. This is a graphic organizer that helps students understand how to write a newspaper article. The top of the pyramid is the headline. We looked at the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill. Its a simple, easy story and most of the students knew the story. We looked at the nursery rhyme and we created a headline for that nursery rhyme. So Jack and Jill turned into "Bad Fall Injures Children". After that, I explained to them that the 5 Ws are the building blocks of a newspaper article: Who, what, where, when, and why. So we identified the 5 Ws in the Jack and Jill story and we added them to our graphic organizer.

Next came 3 details. We pulled 3 details out of the story and we finished with a final detail. Once we had those pieces of information, we created the newspaper article about the Bad Fall Injures Children. This became our anchor chart for how to write a newspaper article. 

Once we did this, the students then became reporters. They made a list of their top 3 sections of the newspaper that they would like to write for. I then put them in small groups, and in their small groups, they figured out what story they would write. They had to do this so not everyone decided to write the same story. Once they figured out what story they wanted to write, this is when we looked at how to be a good reporter. Another anchor chart was reporting tips. This talked about accuracy, audience, how to do an interview, research, writing, and images. I gave them tips about all of these points. At that point, they then started to write their newspaper article. They filled out a graphic organizer that helped them organize their headline, the 5 Ws, 3 details, and a final detail.

After this comes the editing. In 5th and 6th grade, its important that the students learn to assess their own work and work as peer assessors. Their graphic organizer for assessment had 1 section for their own self-assessment, and 2 sections for peer editing. They had to find 2 peers in the classroom that would read their newspaper article, check for the important information; the 5 Ws, the details, the headline, does it grab, and they had to leave comments. The graphic organizer for editing is called The Story Feedback form. This is where the students and their peer editors check for the 5 Ws, they check to see that the headline grabs, they make sure that the opinion is left out of the article, and they can leave comments about how to improve their article. 

Once the students had their edited work, then they revised it and gave it to me for final editing. Once it was completed, it was put into the newspaper format and you can see behind me here what we came up with was a full classroom newspaper. We have a front cover, we have a gaming section, we have a technology section, and a sports section. The students felt really proud of the collaborative effort. Each student in the class gets a copy of the newspaper to bring home with them.