One of the writing genres covered in Year 6 is journalistic writing. Journalistic writing is a type of non-fiction writing where children create newspaper or magazine articles and report on real or imagined events. When teaching journalistic writing, a prompt will give your students reason to write as well as an audience. Here is an effective writing prompt for journalistic writing you can use with your students; it inspired great pieces of writing from my class.

Scenario: Tell your pupils to imagine that they are all journalists, you are their newspaper editor and that you have called them in on a meeting because of some breaking news. Early in the morning the newspaper received the following video. You are sending all your journalists to get information about this event and write an article for the newspaper. The best newspaper article will be the one published in tomorrow’s newspaper. Show them the video and wait for reactions (not for the faint hearted).

*Note: You may find that many of your students will already know the application used to make this, but just play along with it and tell them to pretend that it is real.

Make sure that your pupils are familiar with the features of journalistic writing. Checklists are a great way to help your pupils stay on track when writing. Encourage their peers to assess their writing as well as give teacher feedback. That way assessment isn’t always coming from you.  You can use many found online or click { HERE } to download an editable one from Saved you a Spot, for free!

Below is a funny newspaper article that was written by one of my many, young inspired “journalists”.

Till next time…