Take on the role of chief editor in your classroom and assign different roles to pupils depending on the content of the lesson: eg reporter, subeditor, picture editor. Use props to represent the different roles.
Reporters gain access to more people and places when they have a press pass. Create press passes for pupils to wear when they are learning about news and producing their own reports.
Deadlines are a vital part of producing the news, so use deadlines with your pupils to replicate the experience of the newsroom and add energy and pace to activities. A countdown timer works well, along with news jingles for sound effects.
Use “breaking news” bulletins to introduce challenges, questions, new learning.
Change the layout of the classroom to reflect a real newsroom setting (see below).
Create a NewsWise display to track pupils’ learning. This could include: the NewsWise values poster; the NewsWise Navigator; favourite news articles; fake news stories the class has identified; pupils’ own work; photos of them as journalists in action.
Turn a whiteboard into a news planning board (see below), to display and evaluate pupils’ work or compare different news front pages.
News is happening all around the world, 24 hours a day, so newsrooms often display clocks from different timezones. Timeanddate.com is a good online source for this. You and your pupils can select cities that are meaningful for your class using the personal world clock settings.
Create the right atmosphere in your classroom with some newsy music. Youtube has several royalty-free examples including Top News Broadcast, Breaking News, News Music Bed and The Headlines.
More ideas and resources for teaching news literacy can be found on the Guardian Education Centre’s resources for teachers page.
