Journalism Summary 1/7/13

The time is nigh for the publication of the last issue of The Mosaic Monthly! What a wonderful journey this has been for me! I hope your students feel as equally fortified by our experience together. Before I review this week's class, here are some deadlines to keep in mind:

• Monday, January 14 - all articles and/or sections for the paper must be printed out and turned in to the Editor of Issue III.
• Monday, January 21 - edited articles will be returned to students. Final changes must be made and emailed to me by midnight, Tuesday, January 22.
• Monday, January 21 - typed and fully edited fairy tales should be emailed to me for inclusion in our fairy tale booklet. Parents, if possible, please assist with the editing phase.
• Monday, January 28 - last issue of TMM distributed!

In addition to the above, I tasked each student with writing at least one more article before the end of the semester. They may choose from all the writing styles that we have covered; news (should incorporate at least one element of an in-depth), feature, editorial-opinion, or creative works (photos, poems or short stories) which may be eligible for the new Literary Arts section.

Unless your student has a significant writing assignment due for the paper next week, they should plan to read these pieces aloud on Monday, January 14. From these pieces, I will select a few articles to appear in our last issue. The students normally vote, but in this instance, it will be Editor-in-Chief's choice.

There are some students who may need additional time to complete this assignment since they may not have begun their work for Issue III. We went around the room on Monday and clarified everyone's assignment(s), so they should know. Please feel free to ask, however, should anything remain unclear.

---

The Next Steps

We have covered so much this semester in terms of the different types of writing found in newspapers today. The students have done a great job of understanding and expressing these differences.

Our main challenges lie in choosing topics and pushing ourselves to write more than we think we are capable of. To that end, we engaged in an interesting timed writing exercise on Monday that required students to make a list of objects important to them and then to choose the foremost object they believed they could write a news article on.

After writing for five minutes without stopping, we broke into small groups of 2-3. The idea was to read our writing to our partner(s) and for our partner(s) to then give us as much feedback as possible in 2 minutes, without stopping. After receiving feedback, we revised and/or wrote on our topic for another five minutes, switched partners and then repeated the feedback process. The students all agreed it was easier to write than give feedback! We used this opportunity to understand that writing is a process! Publishable writing may need several revisions before it is complete; part of the revision process includes talking about our writing.

Next week we will continue our on-going discussions of what makes a good news story and prepare for our last layout session on Monday the 21st. Please feel free to contact me if I can help your student in any way!

---