Part of it All
Module 1, Activity 1.9 - Parts of a Newspaper
Student Page
(student page for this lesson)

Introduction:

In this lesson, the students will learn the parts of a newspaper and various ways in which papers are made.

Resources:
- for additional reading, look at this external link about what consumers look for in newspapers
- Meadow Lake Progress pages (in .pdf only)
- virtual tour
- on-line quizzes
- parts of a newspaper puzzle (.doc) or (.rtf)

Activities:

Task One - Virtual Tour
Students can choose one of two virtual tours found on the student page for this lesson. However, if possible, you should try to take them for a tour of a local newspaper. Through this process, students get an idea of how small a role the finding and telling of stories plays in the overall production of a paper.

If you have access to a smaller rural paper, you might choose to tour that and to complete the virtual tour of the LA Times. This would provide your students with experiences that will benefit them in Tasks Three and Four.

Task Three - The Puzzle
Print off a copy of the newspaper puzzle, copy it and have students cut out each square. As a group of two or three, the students should arrange the squares in the order events happen.

The squares deliberately use terminology that students may need to look up and some tiles have no clear order or just provide the students with additional information. The purpose of the activity is to introduce students to the complexity of a daily paper and its production. When students are done arranging the tiles, have them compare work with another group to see if they got the same order. At the end of the activity, have the class create a summary of how a paper gets from story ideas to the start of a day to the paper people read the next. Stress that there is no one way that a daily paper is always structured.

Instructional Strategies:

Task 1 - Field Trip (Experiential)
Task 2 - Drill and Practice (Direct, Independent)
Task 3 - Problem solving (Indirect)
Task 4 - Discussion (Interactive)

Task Four - Heart of Saskatchewan

In this activity, students compare daily papers to weekly rural papers through a look at page layout.They will look at paginated .pdf copies of the Meadow Lake Progress and label the parts of the paper terms they learned in Task Two. Once this is completed, the class should discuss how rural weekly papers differ from large daily papers and what challenges face each type of journalist.

Download the pages from various editions of the Meadow Lake Progress as an entire zip file or allow students to access their pages individually on the web site.

Through the discussion elements in Tasks Three and Four teachers have the opportunity to assess acquisition through formal questioning, and reinforce concepts as needed.