51ºÚÁÏ

A fifteen lesson writing unit, leading students towards writing their own newspaper article based on a fictional event: people have lost their shadows.

This would make a great unit to be taught alongside a Science unit on light and shadows, or as a way to revisit Scientific knowledge.

The lessons begin with exploring the text type using three differentiated example texts, followed by sentence level work and ending with the students writing their newspaper report. The lessons are differentiated, where appropriate, and carefully planned to suit different students needs.

Lesson order:

• Hook lesson: introducing the newspaper story, people have lost their shadows. Students take part in a fun treasure hunt activity to piece together the story.
• Identifying and sorting features of a newspaper report, using differentiated example texts.
• Understanding facts an opinions and their use in a newspaper report. Activities involve sorting facts and opinions, re-writing them and explaining their use.
• Writing headlines.
• Writing captions, including using prepositions.
• Generating appropriate vocabulary for our newspaper report.
• Generating fronted adverbials to be used in our newspaper report.
• Understanding and using conjunctions, this fun activity involves students rolling a dice to see which conjunction makes sense in a sentence and which fits best.
• Writing in the past tense, re-writing sentences in the past tense and writing own sentences using given past tense verbs.
• Writing quotes, punctuating direct speech for quotes in a newspaper report. This lesson also includes a hot seating activity for the whole class to engage in before writing their own quotes.
• Writing the report: writing the introduction.
• Writing the report: writing the main body.
• Writing the report: writing the conclusion.
• Writing the report: editing.
• Writing the report: publishing.

Lesson activities are downloaded as PDF files