News Writing - Studying the Newspaper & Writing a News Article: A Unit Plan

This complete, 3-week unit plan contains materials designed to teach students about journalism, newspapers, and news writing. This unit is a terrific way to connect to the Common Core Standards’ emphasis on informational and non-fiction reading and writing. The unit packet contains a daily breakdown of lessons, activities, worksheets, a quiz, as well as a project sheet and rubric to use for a final assessment in the unit.

In this unit students read a variety of news articles to expose them to current news and to the style of news writing. Students also learn about the parts of a news article (headlines, bylines, leads, etc), key journalistic terms (the angle, objectivity vs. subjectivity, etc), and learn about the techniques that news reporters use to create a strong news article (careful interviewing, inverted pyramid structure, etc). The unit culminates in each student researching and writing their own, individual news article. This final assessment could be easily adapted to have students build newspapers together in groups.

As the subject matter of this unit is directly related to “real world” writing, it is terrific for promoting buy-in with students who may be reluctant readers and writers. This unit would fit very well within a journalism unit (such as before or after lessons on writing an editorial, a letter to the editor, or a book or movie review), or, it could easily stand alone on its own as a single unit. This unit could also help students who take part in classes or clubs like a school newspaper to better understand the purpose, structure, and style of a news article.

This unit was originally developed for use within in a 9th grade ELA/Writing class, however, it could easily be used anyplace from grades 6 through 12.

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Keywords: news, article, news article, news story, newspaper, journalism, journalistic, media, current events, research, interview, interviewing, write, writing, objective, objectivity, nonfiction, non-fiction, informational, project, assessment, group, individual, CCSS, common core, common core state standards