Literacy activities
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Use the Smash script as a stimulus for the text level work as part of your literacy session. Link your current learning objective with an activity below.
Journalistic writing (writing composition): Four literacy sessions
Also includes work on active and passive verbs, opportunities for work on active and passive voice, alliteration and punctuation usage.
Session one
Ask children to collect interesting or exciting newspaper articles for homework (if possible use recent and up-to-date newspapers). When children are in school ask them to cut out the headline from the article and hide the article from others in the class. (You may need to bring in a few newspapers to help - local and national if possible).
During word level/sentence level work ask children to hold up their headline and read aloud as a class. Then ask for different ideas for what the subsequent article could be about. When children respond, ask them to underline or point out the words in the headline which they have used to answer.
For example: A High Price to Pay for Commuters
Children might assume that the article will be about those who travel to work in the morning and home at night (commuters), who are having to pay for their train tickets (high price).
Another example:
Marathon Runners set for a bite at Big Apple
Emphasise the use of Big Apple and its meaning.
Group the children by mixed ability (and mixed ability of topic/general knowledge) into groups of about four. Then Have I Got News for You style, each group in turn reads out a headline. The other groups have two minutes to come up with the most amusing, interesting story which could relate to the headline. The group that reads out the headline can then choose the best response and assign points (out of five). There should be five bonus points to the group which knows the correct answer.
