Newspaper Review Project

Since I am now teaching in the homeroom classrooms for my 5th grade, I have discovered that I now have a lot more control over the class and what we do. Now this lesson was in no way my idea. For 5th grade, as well as all the grades, we have a textbook to follow, but this year we have a new book to use. Just like with the old one, they have fun review like activities every few chapters. In the old books, this review would be in the form of a story time (which I did a post on last October).
But in this new book, it is a bunch of new activities. Now these reviews are supposed to take three days, but because of my trip to Jeju for the conference, I actually missed both the test for the previous unit and the first day of this review. The star of the review was a newspaper project that I made into much more than it needed to be. I just love creative activities like this and I will try and get my students to make things any time I get the opportunity. I hope the textbook allows for more days like this one in the coming reviews.

The final day of the three review days was a 'newspaper' of sorts. Since the first two chapters were on where you are from and what you like to do on the weekends, it was perfect for personal stories and interviews for a newspaper. Now in the book, it says we were supposed to spend more time on the actual reading of the example newspaper, but I was way too excited. I just wanted them to make their own news bulletin as it ended up being. Each class is made of about 22 or 23 students if everyone is there. I decided I wanted to put them in five groups. Each group was assigned one part of the project. They were so excited when I told them that they were going to get to choose their own groups. That rarely happens for them, just like in any elementary school, I suppose. Once they were in the groups I gave them their choices and each group picked one. If two groups wanted to do the same thing, they would rock, paper, scissors for who would get to do it. In Korea, rock, paper, scissors can solve world problems. Literally. I've seen grown men use it.

The project was split into five parts:
1) Welcome Friends- Students would write a profile of sorts introducing themselves. (two per class).
2) My Weekend Pictures- Students would draw a picture about what they do on the weekends and 'caption' it (two to three per class).
3) Teacher interview- Students would interview the teachers and write up the dialogue. (Two per class).
4) Comic Strip- Write and illustrate an amusing comic using the vocabulary. (One per class)
5)Designer- This group designed the poster and would layout all of the pieces the others created.

Now this wasn't the same for every class. Depending on what students ended up in each group determined where I spent most of my time and helped, but it was so fun and the students were so proud of what they created in English. It was also really nice to see all the really cute pictures. Korean kids are so artistic. I couldn't and still can't draw that well. Each class came out with something just a little bit different and it really was a testament to the different dynamics and personalities of each class.