I went back to school last week.
Well, sort of. Last Thursday marked BBC School Report Day, the day designed by BBC Learning to help schoolchildren make their own news reports.
The project is aimed mainly at secondary schools but I joined a colleague at Horn’s Mill Primary School in Helsby to run a news-writing and media-literacy workshop for year six pupils [pictured above].
The day-long project took a cross-curriculum approach and was based around the class’ set text, King Kong.
The class worked in pairs to research, structure and write a series of news reports about New York City.
After the morning editorial conference, we draw up a news list [pictured below].
Here are some of things we talked about:
- What do journalists do all day?
- What makes news? How do we find news?
- Why is direct speech important for writing articles?
- How is it different to write stories in a media style?
- What reflections and learning points did we get from the day?
Here are a selection of the comments from the learners on the day:
- “I really enjoyed it. We discovered there are a lot of stages to writing a good story” – Oscar & Nathan
- “It was fun. We found out how to use the who, what, where, when, why, how.” – Jess & Izzy
- “I learnt about writing stories and that research is as important as writing.” – Billy & Amy
- “It was interesting to meet a reporter and learn how to write a news report.” – Zak & Keira
* Do you have any tips for leading KS2 workshops? Share your views below.
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