READING, REVIEWING and RETELLING NEWS – pupil examples
PART 1) READING AND REVIEWING: IDENTIFYING FAVOURITE NEWS STORIES
Pupils were told that the project was to identify what they thought were the most interesting and important news stories in the week’s First News, and then to find ways to encourage other pupils to read and discuss these stories.
- Can you find the stories that you think are most interesting in this week’s newspaper?
- Can you articulate the reasons for choosing your favourite stories?
- Can you find a way to tell everyone else about these stories and persuade more people to read them?
i) Free-ranging talk and modelling talk
The children flicked through their copy of the newspaper looking for interesting stories.
“When I look at the pages I’m looking for things I’m interested in, like sea creatures, to see if they’re in any of the photos and I’ll read those stories first.”
Daisy
“I don’t have to read all of it. I pick out the stories that are interesting and relevant to me, and read those ones.”
Noah
“I look at the headlines too, like this one about Harry Potter. I LOVE Harry Potter so I’m going to read that story first”
Oisin
The children recorded stories they potentially might recommend in the following table (download at end of page).
Teacher modelled feeding back favourite story with justifications, i.e. the reason for choosing the article and illustrative information from story to give evidence for the choice. All children chose their strongest story to feedback to the group, practising explaining their reasoning.
ii) Supporting navigation through the newspaper
In pairs, children were given a couple of sections of the newspaper to review (download newspaper section cards) to direct them to sections they might not have chosen to read. And, then picked the story they thought was most interesting from their sections.
PART 2) RETELLING NEWS
i) CREATING PODCASTS – YEAR 5 NEWS REVIEWERS AT ALDERSBROOK PRIMARY SCHOOL, REDBRIDGE
The children briefly practised how they could tell other people about their chosen stories in a podcast. Some pairs talked this through, others chose to write scripts.
A speaking frame could also be used to support children.
The group then discussed and decided the order the story recommendations should be recorded for the podcast. The podcasts were then recorded on a smart phone, pausing between each pupil or pair. The pauses between each contributor were deleted using Audacity, the free-source audio editor. The audio files were given to all classes to listen to before reading the week’s newspaper.
Listen to Oisin, Alexandra, Zani, Megan, Noah and Daisy’s Podcasts:
First News Reviewers Podcast 7th Nov 2014, Issue 438
First News Reviewers Podcast 24th Oct 2014, Issue 436
ii) CREATING NEWS BROADCASTS
Example coming soon.
iii) CREATING PRINT OR DIGITAL POSTERS
Creating posters in PowerPoint to publicise news stories meant they could be printed out and displayed around the school, or the powerpoint could be used on interactive whiteboards in classes that had copies of First News. Download the PowerPoint Teaching Example and the PowerPoint Pupil’s Posters for Issue 438 at the bottom of this web page.
iv) NEWS REVIEW TWEETS
Twitter is an ideal channel to publicise interesting news stories to other people. The children at Aldersbrook Primary School were very motivated by the challenge of having to tease a story in only 140 characters, and we tried a few.
Suggestions to get started:
- Work in Word. Children can use the word count tool to check their characters, and write lots of tweets to then improve.
- Discuss examples and work to improve the message to be posted. There are fantastic possibilities to develop keen interest in every word in the sentence and how it is working!
- The real audience for children’s writing provides motivation.
- Check school’s internet safety policy. Is it OK for children’s names to be used in a tweet from the school’s account?
- Start cautiously and collect tweets together for adult to send.
- Lots of experimenting possible – add photo and this reduces the character count down by approx. 23 characters.