For Other Professionals
Blogs About Reading
Sound It Out
Along with her background as a researcher, writer, and teacher, Joanne Meier is a mom. Join Joanne every week as she shares her experiences raising her own young readers, and guides parents and teachers on the best practices in reading.
Read all about it! We're writing a newspaper
My kids are home from school, again! We've had strange winter weather here in Virginia, with a huge snow fall in December (27 inches!), flash flooding that closed the schools in early January, and then another 9 inches of snow late last week. The kids have been home. A lot! And they're getting bored.
Yesterday they came up with the idea to write their own newspaper. Always willing to take on a literacy related project with neighborhood kids, we brainstormed various "news stories" to include.
They came up with the following list:
- A summary of the day's sledding down the neighborhood Big Hill
- Sledding do's and don'ts
- A recipe for hot chocolate (a surefire winner with marshmallows and whipped cream)
- A jokes and riddles section (guess whose idea that was?)
- A winter day word search (kids love a word search, but should teachers?)
It's turning into quite a project. Their current plan is to use ReadWriteThink's Printing Press to create the newspaper. Anna's working with Puzzlemaker to make the word search. The other cul-de-sac kids are off drafting their own columns.
Stay tuned! If the newspaper actually goes to "print," I'll post it here.
Hi, What a great idea, I've been ecouraging my 8 yesr old son to write and be creative with stories. We have decided to put the stories on a blog, which has also helped his computing skills. The whle project has been such great fun. I must also admit the quality time I'm spending with him is priceless. Expecially when he sees that there positive comments about the stories. I know I'm not Wordsworth but the fun and joy it brings it doen't really matter. Cheers Pete.
Posted by: Pete | February 15, 2010 11:37 AMThis year I have very little writing time so I have decided to create a classroom newspaper. We are going to use the Bear Essentials News as our example. It will become a year long project with students rotating through various positions and learning about the different forms of writing through small group instruction.We hope to publish our work using Pages and produce a new paper each month. We will also post each publication on our classroom website. I am excited about trying something new and seeing the impact it will have on my students writing skills when they realize they are writing for a real audience. Thanks for your post, I found it very helpful.
Posted by: Tina | July 14, 2010 11:10 AMTina: Keep me posted! I can't wait to hear how it's going! Sounds like you'll have a great year.
Posted by: Joanne | July 15, 2010 07:09 AMI am playing "nanny" to my 2 nieces and nephews next two weeks. The 9 yr old is only reading on a first grade level. He can read the words but comprehension of the story just isn't there. Any suggestions? I teach English at the high school level.
Posted by: Elaine | August 02, 2010 04:47 PM
Comments
We have dueling newspapers on our street--two third graders peddle their posts to the neighbors. The weather report seems to get the most attention, though we did get a nice photo of the fire truck when a car ran into the street sign. Both boys seem to have a great time putting their papers together and made impress use of word art!
Posted by: Rebecca | February 05, 2010 02:29 PM