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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