Breaking news project

Creating a scholar newspaper is a very common activity in our schools nowadays. In this way, we are going to try something different. Instead of a printed newspaper, we are going to create a news radio programme where our student will tell the rest of students the projects and activities that we are doing at school.

This activity is focus on 5th and 6th graders. They will record a programme every month during the whole year course.

Objectives

Bearing in mind that our goal is to promote our pupil’s acquisition of communicative competence,  we have set the following course objectives.

• To develop and acquire phonemic awareness of English sounds, as well as the basic stress, rhythm and intonation patterns of the English language.
• To imitate and produce the sounds, stress, rhythm and intonation patterns of the English language with enough accuracy.
• To use with increasing autonomy the vocabulary and high-frequency structures they learn in class.
• To identify relationships between pronunciation, spelling and meaning and to read aloud with proper pronunciation, stress, rhythm and intonation.
• To develop autonomous learning strategies and to learn to use with increasing autonomy all the learning means available, including ICT.
• To develop collaborative attitudes and learn to work in teams.
• To learn some basic aspects of the target culture.
• To communicate in English while working in groups, respecting the ideas and opinions of their peers.

Competences

The key competences that our students need to develop are:

• The ability to speak foreign languages.
• Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology.
• ICT skills
• Social and civic competences.
• Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship.
• Capacity to learn to learn.
• Cultural awareness and expression.

Services

Children will have access to the ICT and audiovisual classroom fitted with 15 computers, a digital board, and condenser microphones.

Platforms

The platforms that they are going to use are:

• Garageband: where they can record the radio programme.
• Soundcloud: where they can upload the podcast.

Activities

The first thing that we have to do is sharing out the different roles in the radio programmes.

• Reporters, who interview teachers to know the things that we are going to do in the school.
• Editors, who format news to bring them to the programmes.
• Presenters, who host the programme.
• Technicians, who record the programme and upload it.
• Community managers, who distribute the programme to the rest of the school.

Once, everyone knows what to do, they can start working on their project.

Evaluation

The teacher, as a programme director, will supervise every single step of the process ensuring that all the students are working on their tasks, and he will help them if it was necessary. The teacher also scaffold his students with pronunciation, grammar and ICTs.