1.News Scavenger Hunt: Organize a scavenger hunt for your students to find and analyze news articles. They can bring in clippings, share online links, or even write their own summaries.
2.Interview Practice: Teach students the art of interviewing by having them partner up and practice asking each other open-ended questions.
3.Classroom Newsletters: Encourage students to contribute news stories or opinion pieces to a classroom newsletter, fostering their interest in journalism.
4.School Newspaper: If your school doesn’t already have one, start a school newspaper with your middle schoolers and enlist them as journalists to cover school events, news, sports, and other topics.
5.Guest Speakers: Invite local journalists to speak about their experiences and answer student questions about the field of journalism.
6.Blogger’s Club: Form an after-school club focusing on blogging where students can learn about journalistic writing styles in an online medium.
7.Digital Portfolio: Encourage your middle schoolers to create their digital portfolio of journalistic work that they can showcase later on.
8.Current Events Discussions: Lead regular in-class discussions about newsworthy events and have students consider possible angles for reporting on the story.
9.Collaborative Fictional Storytelling: Have students create a fictional news story collectively, where each student contributes a paragraph or two before passing it on.
10.Mock Press Conferences: Set up a mock press conference with your students acting as journalists and subject matter experts.
11.Journalistic Ethics Debate: Discuss real-life journalistic controversies relating to ethics and encourage students to engage in debates around these issues.
12.Field Trips to Local Media Outlets: Visit local newspapers, television stations, or radio stations with your class so they can see journalism in action.
13.Podcast Club: Create a club centered around creating podcasts where students learn the basics of storytelling through audio journalism.
14.Social Media Reporting: Have students create, curate, and share content through social media platforms using journalistic principles.
15.Op-Ed Writing: Assign students to write opinion pieces on timely events and issues, honing their persuasive writing skills.
16.Video Reporting: Teach students the basics of video reporting by having them film interviews and create their own news videos.
17.Book Review Column: Encourage students to write book reviews for your classroom or school newspaper, highlighting journalism-inspired books.
18.Current Events Quiz: Test your students’ knowledge of recent national and global news by holding weekly current events quizzes.
19.Peer Editing Workshops: Develop peer editing workshops where middle schoolers can critique each other’s journalistic work and foster teamwork and collaboration.
20.Reporter Roleplaying: Provide scenarios where your students pretend they are a field reporter covering a breaking news story, helping them practice their reporting skills.
