This week my class finished writing Non Fiction Newspaper Articles. They researched a specific topic in leveled Non Fiction books, organized their research into "Boxes and Bullets", paragraphed their bullets, editted their work and then published their pieces. This project took about 3 weeks.
I first demostrated how to look for big ideas in non fiction books and how to stay focused when there are so many distractions on a page including bold faced words, captions, diagrams, vocabulary words, pictures and graphs. Next, I showed the class how to find supporting information for the big idea. Through use of boxes and bullets my students gathered a lot of information.
After creating the boxes and bullets, the class used their knowledge of outlining to create basic newspaper articles of multiple paragraphs on one central topic. These newspapers were beautiful. We used Microsoft Publisher and had a Fun Facts section, 1 large article, 1 smaller article of only 2 paragraphs, imported many photographs, created catchy titles and included issue numbers and text formatting.
When all our newspapers were finished I asked the students to lie their papers out on their desks with a comment sheet. I explained that we were going to walk around the classroom and read each others newspapers. After reading, each student then would wrote something kind and helpful including something they liked about the article. My students know they can not say "it was good" or "nice job". I always expect details and a quote or specific connection to the authors work. Here is the video from the Reader's Museum. It was a huge success with the reading teachers and teaching assistants participating also. I recommend this activity at the end of every Writer's Workshop project!
