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.
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.