Your Mission
     Your mission is to submit a well written news article each week.  You should organize your writing in such a way that a reader can easily follow what you are saying.  Use effective and specific vocabulary.  Write to inform the reader by providing appropriate facts and details.  Exclude extraneous and inappropriate information.
 

The Materials
     Students may use any newspaper, magazine articles from Time or Newsweek, or news websites to retrieve articles.  Copies of the Daily Republic are delivered to our classroom for your use.

  Students may use the following websites:
San Francisco Chronicle
Fairfield Daily Republic
USA Today

Activities
Introductory Activity
1.  Lesson will be modeled for the students by the teacher

• Each student will have a copy of the sample news article
• The sample news article will be displayed on the overhead
• Each student will read the article & answer the following questions:

• Click here for PowerPoint Presentation
• Students will be instructed to find the sentence that corresponds to the number in the news article (example: #1. Who?) and write that number next to the sentence.  Students will find the sentence that corresponds to numbers 2 through 6.
• The teacher will write out  the sentences #1-6 on the board.  When all  the sentences are on the board, the teacher will model writing the sentences into a paragraph to make the summary.
• Students will use the Inverted Pyramid News Story model for the first 4 news articles.  After that, students will turn in a news summary each Friday in paragraph form, either handwritten or computer printed.

Your Grade
Each news article is worth 10 points.  Those points will be added into your weekly total and averaged into your semester grade.

Teacher Corner
Other news sources that you might want to use:
Newsweek
Time.com
AOL and other providers have usually have top news stories.  All you need to do is click on the headline.