Writing a Family Newspaper
This is a writing activity that I recently organized for my children as another fun way of keeping a summer journal.
This year I promoted them to newspaper reporters!
My kids happened to be in this copy of our local paper!
We started by looking closely at our community paper and asking ourselves…
- What information can you find in the newspaper?
- How is the information laid out?
- What kind of photos do they use in the newspaper?
- What information is often included in an “article”?
- What information and photos should we include in our newspaper?
- What “catchy” titles could we use for our articles?
I have made two printable worksheets that are available to everyone here and here. On the first worksheet we recorded our newspaper observations. On the second worksheet we collected the basic information that all good reporters use to write a great story: who, what, where, when, why and how! We then drafted some short “stories” and chose photos to correspond with what we had written about. Finally, we pieced everything into our newspaper layout
using basic graphic software.
And here are some of the fun books that we read during our time as newspaper reporters:
- News for Dogs by Lois Duncan
- The Landry News by Andrew Clements
- Fairytale News by Colin and Jacqui Hawkins
- Extra! Extra! Fairy-Tale News from Hidden Forest by Alma Flor Ada
The end results were two very proud kids (that willingly practiced their writing skills) and a personalized “newspaper” to re-read and enjoy year after year!
Joey
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Oh, I love this. This would be such a fun way to do an annual wrap up. I can’t wait for the kids to get a bit older and tackle this. Thanks so much!
Love it! I used to make family newspapers all the time back in the pre-computer days using an old mechanical typewriter or just writing it out by hand…and I actually grew up to be an editor! I can’t wait until my boys can start doing this.
This is so awesome!!
Sarah M
what a fun family project!
[...] this idea to write a family newspaper (Playful [...]
I teach at a Junior College and one of the courses requires students to create a newsletter using Publisher. I’d love to share your worksheets with my students to give them content ideas!
Yes, of course! Using good graphic software opens up endless creative possibilities and the results are so satisfying! You are lucky to be teaching such a fun course!
~ joey ~
What graphic software do you recommend? thanks!