Newspaper project instructions and plan
Lots of newspapers, especially at the weekend, are full of different sections on a huge variety of topics. Over the next 2 weeks you will produce a mini newspaper with 6 different sections, one on news, education, sports, entertainment, cookery and puzzles.
Each day you will make an article for a different section of the newspaper. There is a guide to help you and often examples to show you how to put together your own article and to give you ideas. You are the journalists for this project - we hope you enjoy your new job!
At the end of the project you may want to put your articles together in one newspaper and put a title. You could call it the Covid Chronicle or the Abingdon Times or the Oxford Oracle. If you hand in your articles, we can build a whole class newspaper with these different sections and share it with each other.
Plan of action for the two week Covid Chronicles newspaper project
Week 1
Day 1 - News article - turning bullet point notes into a full sentences
Day 2 - Education - interview teachers, pupils and parents about remote learning
Day 3 - Cookery - share your favourite recipe and explain why you love it
Week 2
Day 4 - Entertainment - review some of the best programs, films and books
Day 5 - Puzzles - create your own crossword by writing definitions of words
Day 6 - Sports - write a report on some family exercise as if it’s a sporting event
Creating an online newspaper for the whole class
As an extension of the newspaper project, we are planning to put together the articles that the kids have been writing into an online newspaper called The Europa Times. A template of the online newspaper can be found here 
This activity is optional and is up to the kids (and their parents) if they are keen to contribute to the online newspaper. There are three option for the kids to participate with each option providing the opportunity to submit articles created for the above activity as contribution to the online newspaper but with varying levels of input, time and effort requirements from the pupil and, for the last activity, the parent/s.
Option 1: Submit article/s to Mrs Trevitt and indicate that child and parent/s happy to have child’s work put on the online newspaper
This will be the easiest of the three options as child and parent/s will just need to indicate whether they are happy for the article/s submitted by child to be put on the class online newspaper. Then the editors will convert the article submitted into appropriate code ready for publishing. We might come back to ask the child for her/his preference for a pseudonym (rather than actual name) and a choice of an icon to serve as her/his avatar on the online newspaper.
This is the easiest way to contribute as the child’s work will still be used but no other input will be required. This might be most suitable for parents as well as the other options would require a bit of effort on the part of the parents as well.
Option 2: Submit articles to Mrs Trevitt and then child follows a set of pictographic instructions on how to convert her/his own article into the appropriate code for publication
One child has submitted article to Mrs Trevitt, she/he can work on converting her/his document into a appropriate code for publication.
An online tutorial on how to convert their newspaper articles into the appropriate code for publication can be found here
A PDF version of the tutorial can be downloaded here
The instructions will guide the child on how to convert the document. Once done, she/he can submit the code to the editors for publication.
This is a good in between option as it will provide the child with an activity learning how to do markup code (code for creating documunts such as web pages).
Option 3: Submit articles to Mrs Trevitt, child follows a set of pictographic instructions on how to convert article to code and then child publishes her/his own code into the online newspaper
This option is exactly the same as option 2 with the addition of the child publishing her/his own work online straight into the online newspaper. This will give the child the opportunity to interact with some website publishing tools and see how some website are created. However, this will require a bit more guidance and effort from parents as children will have to login to the website generator that we are using. If some children will opt for this activity, we will hold a Google Meet session/s so that we can guide the kids step-by-step in publishing their articles (as per parents permission).
We will hold 1-hour sessions throughout this Friday, 12 June 2020 for those who are interested in doing Option 3. Please let Ernest know via private message on WhatsApp or an email to confirm that your child will be participating. Tentatively, we’ll have two sessions in the morning.
First session - 10 -11 am
Second session - 11:30-12:30
If there is more interest, we will add two more sessions in the afternoon.