Tag: Overleigh St Marys

KS2 writing workshop for Overleigh St Mary’s Primary School, Chester

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Just time to fit in another workshop for schools before Christmas.

It was, in fact, a return trip to Overleigh St Marys Primary School in Chester to run another media writing workshop for Key Stage 2 (KS2).

The focus this year was news (factual writing) vs. blogs (persuasive writing) and we based our stories around a space theme with the hook of Major Time Peake blasting off to the International Space Station (ISS) on December 15.

Amongst the topics we discussed:

  • What is news?
  • How to structure of news writing
  • How to use quotes
  • What is a blog post?
  • How to structure a blog post
  • How to research, not rant

By the end of the morning we had a Newsround-style opportunity to read out our stories with the final versions to go live on the school website shortly — check back for details.

What did you think of this story? Post your comments below.

Liked this? Try also BBC School report Day at Horns Mill Primary School.

Overleigh St Marys Primary School: a media-writing workshop for KS2

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I like a challenge.

It’s one thing lecturing a group of student journalists in a university lecture theatre but how about inspiring a primary school class to develop their news sense as part of KS2 literacy?

Well, that’s exactly what I tried to do this week, delivering two media-writing workshops to year-five learners at my local primary school.

The classes had just done a school trip to Spaceport on The Wirral and I used their try as basis to write some simple articles.

Some of things I talked about included:

  • What is news? How do we identify news?
  • How do we structure a news story?
  • What are interviews? What makes a good interview?
  • Why is direct speech import for writing articles?
  • What’s the difference between news and feature stories?
  • Why are intros so important in a feature?

Here are a selection of the comments from the learners on the day:

  • “It was s fun. I would like to be a journalist now. I love it!” – Charlie
  • “It was fun, interesting and constructive. It made me learn about writing news.” – Emi
  • “I thought it was real interesting. It was very descriptive. I liked it a lot.” – Amy
  • “I liked learning more about newspapers and features. Give even more examples. It was inspiring.” – Will
  • “It was constructive with lots of complicated words and sentences to make me think.” – Lily

* Do you have any tips for leading KS2 workshops? Share your views below.

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