Goal:  Students will create a penny newsletter.  This lesson is a fairly extensive project that can be implemented over several days or weeks. 

Objectives:

1. Compose texts using the prewriting and drafting strategies of effective writers and speakers
2. Compose oral, written, and visual presentations that express personal ideas, inform, and persuade
3. Identify how language choices in writing and speaking affect thoughts and feelings
4. Assess the effectiveness of choice of details, organizational pattern, word choice, syntax, use of figurative language, and rhetorical devices in the student's own composing
5. Demonstrate active listening strategies
6. Comprehend and analyze what is heard

Launch:
1.  Use a newspaper to describe its various parts.  Ask students to describe the role of a reporter and the difference between reporting and editorializing. 

Part 1, Explore:
Students will explore the parts of a newspaper. 

1. Put students in teams, each team with one full newspaper.  (They don’t all have to be the same date.) 

2. Ask students to list the sections of each newspaper and then to break each down the various smaller sections.  For example, the A section contains national, state and major local news, as well as the opinion page.  The opinion page includes an editorial from the paper’s editorial board, letters to the editor, political cartoons and syndicated columns.

Part 1, Summary:
3.   Each team will choose to describe one section of the paper to the rest of the class.  Investigative questions:  Where do the stories come from?  Who writes them?  What makes various sections distinct?  Why do sports reporters write differently from other journalists?  Why do newspapers include things like comics?

Part 2, Explore:
4.   Students will create a Penny Newsletter.  Each team will create a section based on the newspaper section they described in part 1.  Members of the teams can divide up into various roles:  reporters, editors and designers, for example.  Investigative questions:  What is the importance of being accurate in newspaper writing?  What’s the best way to conduct an interview?  Students should keep in mind the “who, what, when, why and how” of each story.

5.   Students should do real or mock interviews for the research for each story.  Here are some examples of stories:

• What Abe Lincoln thought of being on the penny
• Editorial: Why we should keep (or get rid of) the penny
• What Mt. Washington Elementary students think of collecting pennies
• The most rare penny in the U.S.
• A day in the life of a penny
• Mt. Washington Elementary Tigers win city-wide penny pitching contest
• Consider including letters to the editor, political cartoons, and even a comic strip.  Students can even “sell” ads to their newspaper. 

Part 2, Summary:

1. Students will display their newspaper sections near the classroom. 
2. If possible, students can distribute copies of their newspapers to the school or a selected segment of the school.

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