Part 3 in our fun with the news series…
Activity 3: Headlines
Another activity the children liked as a filler was trying to write succinct headlines.
If we had a spare five minutes at the end of the day, I’d read out a brief news story and the children would have to write a headline for it in six words or less. This got very competitive, both in terms of time taken to do it and quality of answer but the children loved it. It got them thinking about summarising information succinctly and helped with note taking exercises in other subjects.
We found that we had to prepare them the first time by starting off with headlines and asking the children if they could guess what the story behind it would be. We then went on to identify the key features of the news article and looked at how headlines are often a play on words for less serious items or that they miss out some unnecessary words in more serious ones. They soon got the idea and we often had a laugh at some of the more bizarre ones they came up with.
Dave Lewis
Portsmouth High School Junior Dept
