Sunday, October 2, 2011

Donors Choose, Newspaper, and Camera

I finally have entered my first project into the Donors Choose website. I wrote about the project that I started with my students that I had last year. I have never seen students so interested in writing about topics before the newspaper project. It all started when I had my class write thank you letters to the local community college journalism department. They and other area organizations had donated hats, gloves, and many other winter items to our school due to the high poverty level in our area.
The journalism department contacted me and said that my class was the only one they they had received thank yous from and wanted to know if I was interested in starting a classroom newspaper with their help. So over the course of the second semester, the college students would come in and help the students with learning about brainstorming newspaper article topics, narrowing down topics, writing sentences properly, and more.
I am really excited to see the students delve into research, interviewing and writing. It will also be really cool if we have the camera, battery, and case funded so the kids can have their own camera to use. Last year, the students had to be supervised using the camera because it belonged to the college journalism department and we could only use it when they were with us. 
 Here you can see our first issue and second issue.