Middle school Journalism help...

[Unregistered]

I am a first year teacher, and I have volunteered to teach Journalism and organize the yearbook. I need help figuring out where to start to make my lesson plans. Will an experienced teacher HELP PLEASE!

[Unregistered]

Hi. I am in the same boat this year. Did you get any useful advice?

[Unregistered]

To tell you the truth...I am still a student, however I am enrolled in several journalism course this year. I am in grade10(In Canada). When I first started journalism it was a little rough, but my teacher(Mr.E.Hewlett) managed to help me out.
1. Ask the students to create online blogs. For assignments they will type them out and then post it in their blog everytime for people to critique them and help them.
2. Have them go to journalist wesites and critque other peoples journalism. The Good and the Bad! This will help the students to find out what people like to read in journalism columns and what people dont like to read in journalism columns.
3. Teach your students to make each article appealing to a medium age group(17-30ish) make sure that they can relate to the articles as well.
4. Instead of making the students write an exam for the end of the course, ask them to write an essay on what they learned this year in journalism class. This way not only did they learn and benefit from your journalism course, but you can find out from students their ideas and what you should have them do for the next years journalism class!:D

Thats all the information I can give you! Try to use most of it...Last year i took journalism and it was nothing like my class this year. This year is great!
Hope It helps!Good Luck!

~EmmaJane~

[Unregistered]

I can't really help with the Journalism, but for your yearbook, use Taylor Publishing if you can.

[Unregistered]

I'm glad that you posted this question. I'm in exactly the same position, and it has definately been a rough year to figure out. I agree with whoever posted the note about Taylor Publishing...they are absolutely amazing! And, to the student who posted the info about the class...please keep posting- help us out here. I have my journalism students for the entire year and right now the yearbook is finished and we still have 2 months left.

I have ZERO experience with journalism, i never even participated in high school so being thrown in as a first year teacher for this has definately been trying. I'll take any help I can get....

[Unregistered]

I am also a first year teacher. I am going to be teaching journalism, included in that is creating a school newspaper, as well as the yearbook for a middle school. I am a little lost as to how to begin my lesons! Any help would be much appreciated.

[Spitball]

When I taught journalism, I would get up in the morning and start taping CNN. In the beginning, I would look for newspaper articles that matched the CNN stories and make overheads of them. Then, I would show the class the tapes. I would then direct them to use a chart to label the who? what? where? when? why? and how? of each story. Afterward, we would look at the newspaper articles and examine that format.

After a week or two, I would just show the tapes daily, and the students would write their own articles. The students really enjoyed the class.

Also, I received twenty-five copies of the local newspaper on Wednesdays and Fridays. We did lots of activities with the various sections.

Here is a link:
www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/journalism.html

I also suggest you google some lessons.

[annettemcd]

In addition to teaching writing skills, you might also consider teaching desktop publishing. I would highly recommend the book, The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams (a woman, not the actor) or any of her other books.

If something is published, it should be highly readable and properly formated, so that attention is not distracted from the message.

Students should learn about fonts, leading, graphics, alignment, etc. and be able to set up a newsletter/newspaper without using a packaged template.

[Unregistered]

I am a middle school student in Journalism class, and Journalism is the best period of the day. We have two teams, green team and blue team. We switch off writing articles each week. We can all come up with ideas for two articles a week, and we write the articles, researching online or interviewing students/people around school if needed. The paper is then put together and sent to the copycenter, and every Friday we deliver the paper to students. That class is small and fun!!!! :-) Don't put too much work on the students, just writing thier articles is enough to keep them busy, and to stay on schedule with the paper. The way I found this website is I was researching article ideas for class and this came up..... My teacher just started this year and she is awesome!!!! :-)

[Unregistered]

I am a first year teacher, and I have volunteered to teach Journalism and organize the yearbook. I need help figuring out where to start to make my lesson plans. Will an experienced teacher HELP PLEASE!

I taught yearbook and journalism for the first time this year and it was pretty difficult, but I was helped an enormous amount by Herff Jones and their representatives. Here are some tips I would suggest (based on learning the hard way of course):

Yearbook
1. See if there are any summer courses being offered in the area that your students can attend to learn the computer software program that you have chosen. I personally use Adobe CS3 and I find it pretty user friendly and can be used both for putting the yearbook together and laying out a newspaper.
2. Get to know the software. I lost three months just trying to figure out the software and we ended up scrambling to meet the deadlines because the learning curve was killing us.
3. Find the kids in your class that are both computer savvy and good, realiable students. Pick this child as your editor in chief. Then also choose the next best student for your managing editor. Let them know they are responsible for organizing and keeping track of pages. I had the work spread out over several students and it became very, very chaotic. Thankfully, I had two students really step up about 1/3 of the way through and then we just started humming.
4. Sit down immediately and decide on a theme and a cover. It makes it so much easier to decide how your sections will be laid out when you can relate them to the theme. Once you decide on a theme then each section (such as sports, academics, etc) has to fit that theme somehow. Challenge the kids to find the connection.
5. Fundraise. Fundraise. Fundraise. I had to buy 3 extra cameras, two printers and a ton of jump drives and CDs to store and move around the photos that we needed. The most success I had as a fundraiser was sending letters to businesses asking them to purchase a minimum of 10 yearbooks and donate them back to the school. This way, I could not only give yearbooks to students that couldn't afford them, but met academic goals, but if I sold them all and didn't need to give them away, I had a lot of extra money for supplies. I also had a car wash, a quiz show variety night and a movie night to raise money.
6. INSIST that your yearbook publishing rep meet with you at least every two weeks (even better if you can get them once a week, but they usually have too many schools to do that). You are paying them a lot of money for their services, so make them deliver them. They are usually experts on the software and can help you organize yourself and your students to make sure that you stay on track. I found it invaluable to keep a list of questions for the day they came and get all my glitches worked out the same day.

Journalism:
1. Don't over reach when putting the paper together. I thought I was going to have this four page paper until I realized that it takes a special printer to printer a paper like that (unless you use a newletter style of paper which I didn't like. I liked the idea of them seeing it folded like a regular paper). I used tabloid size paper and just printed on both sides. The kids thought that was enough and it actually came out pretty good. I personally printed the front page because we did it in color and then had our graphics department copy the back page which was in black and white. I think next year I may have only one photo in color and the rest in black and white because it can be pretty expensive to put it out.
2. Ask other teachers, especially English teachers to get their kids to submit articles for the paper. If you are using yearbook kids to produce the paper, chances are they are pretty overwhelmed already and could use the help. Plus other kids really like seeing their name on a by-line.
3. Ask your local paper for help. They may even donate money to your program. At the very least you can probably get journalism guest speakers to come in and talk to the kids.

Okay, I hope this all helps.

[Unregistered]

It may be far too late for this reply to be any help for the teacher who originally asked, but for any other struggling teachers...

I am now entering my third year teaching middle school journalism. I have a mixed 7th and 8th grade class - most of the 8th graders have taken the class previously and now serve as editors, distribution managers, etc. I *strongly* recommend choosing reliable, experienced students to serve as editors who oversee article selection, copy-editing, and layout. The first year, I had no editors at all; last year, my student editors did a great job and made my life *much* easier.

Our warm-up task every day is a reader response log. Students have about 10 minutes to read an article in the local paper and write a summary, critique, or other response. (I prepared a list of 5 styles for them.) They record these in a journal that I grade about once a month. Because my journalism class is typically the most chaotic of the day, I have found that this warm-up gives me a few calm moments for attendance and other student issues.

I have also found it useful to give students a schedule that shows approximately how long each step of the interviewing/writing process should take. Once you have selected/been assigned a topic, it should take X days to write your questions and schedule your interview. After the interview, it should take X days to write a rough draft... and so on.

Finally, I have never - never - told my students they couldn't do a certain story. I begin each semester with some pretty serious talks about journalism ethics and the real purpose of our school paper. Most of my students buy into the idea that we are promoting the positive. When they have a controversial article, we talk it through to make sure everyone is represented fairly. I've had no scandals so far!

Good luck!

[Unregistered]

I am just beginning a journalism elective with 7th and 8th graders. I last taught HS journalism 20 years ago. Could you provide me with your contact information so I could email you? I'd love to see a syllabus and some lesson plans!

Jill Proehl

[Unregistered]

I also have two 7th and 8th grade journalism classes (first year). It has only been a few days and I am already kinda lost. There is no curriculum and no plans from last year. I would really appreciate receiving a copy of lessons and ideas. If you could post to the site I would really appreciate it.