Journalism Summary and Homework, 9/17/12

We had a fantastic first journalism class on Monday. Even though we accomplished a lot, I did not get as far as I thought we would in my lesson plan, thus, there will not be much homework this week. We needed to spend some extra time on planning out our first issue and assigning reporting and editing jobs, so it was time well spent.

Your student has been assigned a writing (reporting) job, or an area of speciality (weather, comics, photography, etc.) and will also be editing another student's work. We will be doing at least one more issue before the semester is over (three, if we're really good!) so we will definitely be rotating staff positions, in order to give as many people as possible some great writing opportunities. In addition, we will be writing in class and also at home, outside of the articles being created for our newspaper, The Mosaic Monthly (named by the kids!)

On Monday we talked about several things, including, "What is news?" and "Why is the front page so important?" Every week, they will add five new words to a section in their notebooks called J-Jargon. Make sure they are comfortable and familiar with these terms. I want to challenge them to use these terms when they are working with their classmates on The Mosaic Monthly.

A large portion of the material I am using comes from www.hsj.org. The web-site contains archived lesson plans from both public and private high schools throughout the country. The lessons we are using are for grades 9-12. I know they are more than capable of processing this level of material, and honestly, their creativity probably exceeds my own. Very exciting stuff!

For homework, we are designing our newspaper "flag." Please remind them to either come up with an idea for the flag or just a portion. Also, we need questions (anonymous are fine) for our advice columnist. Please have them bring one question, type written, to be handed in on Monday.