Newspaper Report Writing Unit - Years 3 and 4

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 beginning with exploring the text type, followed by sentence level work and ending with writing their newspaper report. The unit uses differentiated example text types throughout to support students understanding. Where appropriate, each lesson is differentiated 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.
• Sorting facts and opinions, understanding their use in a newspaper report.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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