Newspaper Writing in Year 5!

In Year 5, our first writing focus of 2020 was newspaper reports. Our reports were based on our brand-new class text, Street Child.

We began by studying chapter 2 of Street Child, titled The Stick Man. As we read, we noted down questions we had about what was happening in the text and why certain events were happening. Here are some fantastic examples of questions we came up with:

We were really excited to read on and see if any of our questions were answered!

Our next lesson focused on exploring a range of different newspaper reports, which allowed us to get to grips with the genre. We noticed straight away that newspapers always begin with a headline. The headline always has to be catchy and attention grabbing so that readers want to read on! We also learnt about the importance of the lead paragraph; it needs to set the scene and summarise the main points of the article using the 5 w’s (who, what, when, where and why). We then demonstrated our understanding by annotating another example of a newspaper report.

It was time to plan, we couldn’t wait to get started! Our report focused on the poor Jarvis family being evicted from their home by the evil Mr Spink (aka Stick Man). We worked together to create a range of exciting sentences and ideas, which we could use in our report. We made sure to include our grammar focuses for the week: relative clauses, direct and reported speech and adverbs of possibility.

We wrote up our first draft in our writing book, using a green pen to self-edit and improve our work. Miss Davidson also gave us some ‘think pinks’ and a target to further improve our work, so our final draft was the best it could possibly be!

After completing and correcting our first draft, we wrote up our final newspaper report in our writing book. Miss Davidson marked our work, explaining what we did well and how we could improve next time. Some of us even got extra DoJos for accurately including our Words of the Week from Vocabulary lessons.