Mom's Who Teach Mondays

Featuring: the Teacher Mum

We love ALL of our readers and are so excited to be featuring this fabulous mother who loves to teach: TeacherMum. 

Thanks TeacherMum for contributing to our "Mom's Who Teach Mondays" articles!

Last week our very own newspaper was released! Our launch was fantastic, the “excitement was palpable” (my principal’s words) and the kids had a hard time controlling their delight. Instead of an 8 page newspaper, we managed to produce 24 pages of material written by primary school children for other kids to read. I have been informed that our school’s marketing committee were so impressed with our newspaper, that they will now be publishing it on the school’s website as a marketing tool. My reporters are going to be so chuffed. I crawled across the internet looking for ideas for our newspaper, and I really struggled to find them. Usually only high schools and universities make papers. I would like to challenge other primary schools to make their own newspaper. The benefits are numerous. To help get you started, these are the articles we included in our first edition of the year. Most of these ideas belong to the reporters. Where relevant, the photographers I had hired took photos to accompany the articles.

• We made our cover using this incredible tool on http://www.wordle.net/
• Meet your reporters and photographers page (A photo of each with a fun comment, like what they could not live without)
• Editorial
• Comments from new students on what they think of our school and how they are settling in
• Interview with the school principal and a special cartoon of him drawn by a student
• Interview with the head prefects of the school
• Adverts for school clubs
• Class reports or quotations about school excursions and camps
• A great piece of writing from a teacher about her first day of school
• Interviews with our past reporters and what they are up to now
• Latest and Greatest Technology review
• Freakiest and Funniest Facts
• Animal Extinction Report
• Future Report on the 2012 Apocalypse
• Playground report: The Flying Shoe (As luck would have it, when I was on playground duty this week another kid lost his shoe, which landed on the roof – so now we have Flying Shoe 2 in production for our next edition)
• Photographs of the playground at lunchtime – taken by our photographers
• Six to Nine: Six questions were asked to nine different children and their answers were all published (kids love seeing themselves in print)
• Fundraising Report on The World’s Greatest Shave
• Book Review
• School chess and debating report
• Yummy Fun Recipe page
• Puzzle and Jokes page
• The Sports Report
• A music article on Rihanna
• A back page competition

Our next newspaper is in full swing. The reporters have come up with some great ideas which are currently in production:

• A playground report on the amount of rubbish lying around
• A movie review (which involves looking up which movies are coming out in the next holidays and writing a blurb on them)
• Organising for a teacher to write a guest article. I have one teacher writing an article about funny things that have happened to him in all the primary schools he has worked in.
• A poetry page (You have to love Americans – they have something called Poem in my Pocket Day! How amazing is that? I have been given permission to adopt this idea at our school and we are going to promote it through the poetry page)
• Science experiments
• A review of vegetable rice from the school canteen (hopefully that will go down well and the canteen will still let us stick our newspaper ads up at their checkout.)
• What is happening in Year 3? This involves a reporter visiting the Year 3 classroom for a period and writing about the kinds of things they are doing there.
• Articles on kids in the school and what makes them special. We already have an article on a kid who is a great cartoonist.
• An interview with a kid in high school to find out if high school is all it cracked up to be.
• Travel Page
• Environmental Awareness Page
• Lunchbox review as in, "What's In Your Lunchbox?"

Each reporter has their own press ID badge. We have more reporters wanting a position in our paper. Unfortunately there is no more space in the club…but we willingly accept articles from anybody! If you have any more ideas for me on what kids should/could be writing about for their school newspaper, I would love to hear them.

Thanks Teacher Mum!

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{Please note: you do not need to be an educator or past educator to contribute...just a mommy :)}