NEWSPAPER CLASS FOR 8TH GRADE

One of my assignments this next school year will be an elective for 8th graders. The class will be a newspaper class. I have not been told anything other than that. I am supposing that we will produce a school newspaper once a month. Do any of you have any ideas? Do you know of any good software? HELP! judy

Don't know much about doing a newspaper class, but up until this last year I was our middle school's yearbook advisor. I would highly recommend using Adobe In-Design software. Education price on it is not to bad. There is a bit of a learning curve to learn how to use it but after that it is a great program for designing most if not all desktop publishing. Good luck!

For the past 5 years I have taught 7th and 8th grade computer and we have produced a newspaper in the 8th grade class. ( I have an English background so writing is very important to me.) I get a new group of students every 9 weeks...because it is a vocational survey class. However we used.....Publisher by Microsoft and it was nice....a little complicated at first...Also STARS is a competitor of Microsft and they will allow schools to load their software for free on as many PCs as needed and its very similar to the Publisher. Anyways...some of the things we included in our newspaper editions..... 1) Surveys for the season we entitled it "And the survey said..." and "Is that your final answer?" You can ask about favorite after school snacks...favorite sports/teams/ Holiday/ Christmas food/ ANYTHING your students can think to ask. ( this makes it a paper that belongs to the kids) We did certain questions for certain grade levels. ( I teach in a K-8 building.) 2) We did sections about "Around the Halls of CES" 3) Upcoming Events 4) We did 8th grade features ( since they were the top-dogs in the building) This was a questionaire that they filled out in homeroom and I kept them in a file and every issue we printed some of them ...so that everyone was featured in an issue of the newspaper. If you have too many 8th graders, then just have them do students of the grading period or have teachers nominate those to be featured. (If you do this, try to choose those who don't always get to be picked for things.) 5) Sports section 6)Coach and teacher interviews and highlights 7) I had editors that wrote the opening page.... 8) we did editorials about school issues....( screen the articles before you let them print.... you have the right to nix anything questionable.) 9) We did Music/Movie/Book reviews....Author Features.... 10) Top videos 11) "Around the Community ".....articles of interest 12) Jokes/Riddles/Cartoons page 13) Fun Page of puzzles The thing I reminded my students about was that this was a paper for our students and to never lose sight of who our intended audience was going to be. So you will have to decide that. Some warnings/advice for you.... 1) deadlines are crucial 2) publishing will be stressful 3) final product is rewarding 4) pre-sales help against over-printing 5) selling ads helps defray the costs ( we even sold "Happy Ads" to students around Christmas ....for kids to put in messages to their friends and teachers.) 6) Color costs more So with that....GOODLUCK! Cindy in Ohio

I would also include an anthology section - short essay, poetry, etc., so that student work gets to be copyrighted, a calendar of events, and an advertising section to make some $. I've used Pagemaker, but it's rather expensive, for my neighborhood newsletter. Good luck!