By Thursday, all articles must be turned in for editing and proofreading. This reinforces the writing process and instills the concept of meeting a deadline. Corrections are made on Friday and the articles are printed using the Express Publisher program on the computer. Our office staff prints copies of the final product which then goes home every Friday. The Kansas Communications Standards as well as our local curriculum standards are clearly incorporated in this project.
Students focus on writing with a real purpose and distinct audience.
We discuss how the audience changes when we write for the high school paper and this makes sense to the students. From this project, I have had students submit articles to the local and national paper. Three students a year ago interviewed a television crew from the nationally syndicated show Nickelodeon and had their article published in the national Little Britches Rodeo paper. I call that a success. The key is to be motivated to allot considerable time to the writing process so that this becomes one of the ways students are exposed to writing.