Creating the News

Lesson Objective; to get the students to not only read the novel, but to really dig into the time period in which the novel was to take place in order to get the students more into the novel

I will do this lesson after completion of a novel

The teacher will present to the students an example of a newspaper article that may have been presented in a newspaper at the time of the novel. The students will be able to look at the example and see that there are a lot of different ideas that can go into creating this newspaper article.

Once the students have been shown the example, the teacher will explain to them that they are going to be doing a little research in the time period in which the novel took place. They may get two class periods to look up different information. Once they have gathered their information, they are to creat the front cover story of a newspaper from that time period. They get to invent the name of their newspaper, create the pictures for the newspaper and create the stories as they would think they would appear in that time period. It is neat to see the stories that the students will come up with by using the characters from the novel.
I will then have the students present their newspapers to the rest of the class and we will then hang them up for the rest of the school to see.

This activity not only gives the student the opportunity to read the novel and get more interested in it, it also gives them the time to do the research and look into that time period.