Hear ye, hear ye! Read all about it!
The School Yard Informer
Project-Based Learning
Meg Allison, creator
Subject: Information Literacy,Digital Literacy,
Language Arts, Graphic Arts
Grade: Upper Elementary Grades, Middle School
Overview
Just at a time when newspapers around the world are struggling to stay afloat, my fifth and sixth grade students are starting one. They will become the creators and editors of a viable new school newspaper, The School Yard Informer.
Students will begin work on the project during their weekly Library Media class and are encouraged to continue their work outside of class, including during study hall
and at home.
From Theory to Practice
This journalism and information literacy unit has been developed using the Project-Based Learning model. This approach to teaching and learning is contructivist, student-centered, hands-on, and engages students in authentic, real-world tasks. Learning truly is "the active building of knowledge through dynamic interaction with information and experience" (Information Power, 2). This construction of knowledge calls for students to engage in higher order thinking skills, leading to deeper learning and understandings.
Journalism empowers students as media producers and consumers, while promoting well-rounded development by fostering analytical thinking, communication skills, collaboration, team work, and a strong sense of responsibility. Students become engaged in a "learning community" that embraces their peers, teachers, parents, and their local and global communities. Their work will have value beyond the school walls and contains the kernals of "unintended consequences". A central goal of a student-centered library media program is "to assist all students in becoming active and creative locators, evaluators, and users of information to solve problems and satisfy their own curiousity" (Information Power). Creating a student newspaper fits with the role of the library media program to ensure that students produce new information and create products that communicate ideas efficiently and effectively. The learning is naturally differientiated in this unit. Just as there are many roles and positions that contribute to the production of a real-world newspaper, so too with a junior edition. Students will select from a choice of roles - writer, reporter, comic artist, photographer - that best suits their interests and abilities.Just as in the New York Times, the aim of The School Yard Informer is to publish "all the news that's fit to print" by the students, for the students, and of the students.