Decoding Newspaper Articles

Last week students looked closely at some " letters to the editor" in the Mercury focusing on the of rhetorical questions and emotive language. They also looked closely at the structures. Today (Wednesday 27th), we focused on the following article about refugees. We read it through as a class, then students read it twice more and used their highlighters to identify unfamiliar vocabulary. Students used their Writer's Notebooks to answer the broad categories of:

What
Who
Where
When and...
Why

We will be looking at their responses closely after Easter, and some modelling of succinct and informative statements will be done.  Many struggled with the "why" aspect which could be answered on a couple of levels; e.g. Why did the disaster happen, Why was the article written? Students will then be looking at the article using much more in-depth questions which require a more sophisticated level of decoding the text. They will be looking at features of the text, layout and personal response to it. I will add these to the blog after Easter.

Reading the article a few times...

Drafting up some responses

Using maps to locate Christmas Island

A grade five student hard at work

I noticed that many students believed Julia Gillard had written some of the article because she was quoted in it. We will be working hard on decoding central ideas of the article, its key features and they type of language which has been used. I sent about seven students home to read the text again and review their initial responses...as either they missed the main point, or, not enough of the task was completed. More on this soon...