This Week’s Anton Lesson Plan
Grammar, punctuation and vocabulary are the building blocks for a medium like newspapers, that are driven by a journalist’s ability to write and get his or her message across. Verb tenses, active and passive voice and the standard of writing in the third person are all tools reporters use when delivering the news to readers.
The following are exercises students can do to get a taste of the role secondary language arts play in your newspaper.
• Find a news article written in the past tense. Clip it out of the newspaper and then rewrite it in the present tense.
• Select a feature story from the newspaper and then compare and contrast it to the style of a short story.
• In small groups, write two different television commercials based on a product advertised in the newspaper. For one of your commercials, be sure to use the same persuasion technique used in the newspaper.
• Choose an editorial and clip it out of the newspaper. Take a piece of paper and divide it into two columns, labeling one “fact” and the other “opinion.” List the information from the editorial in the appropriate columns and then compare yours with that of another student. Explain the differences between the two.
