The student journalists at the Joan Capó Primary School in Son Gotleu launch a new newspaper.

PalmThe 5th grade curriculum establishes work on certain text genres, including news. Summarize the main activities.

It all started in September.Most schools are not air-conditioned–, because it hurts a lot to be in June and September. "The learning situation focused on the question of why is it so hot"From there, we wanted to work on meteorology, and we started looking for all kinds of news on IB3 and in newspapers like ARA Baleares, which worked well for us because it's the only newspaper in Catalan," explains Víctor Gálvez, tutor of one of the groups.

The school purchased a weather station to measure variables, and students began writing about what was happening at school, with headlines, body text, and corresponding images. At the end of each month of the school year, students used Canva to design a paper page with the headlines and main entries, which was hung on the school door for families and classmates to see.

Improving written skills

Beyond the fact that the students had a good time, because they combined narrative learning with leisure time, there was also an academic benefit: "From October to December, when they worked most intensively on writing news, there was a great improvement. At first, they only wrote three-line news stories; by the end, everything was smoother, and they had more tools to write all the academic results in Catalan than in Spanish, even though Spanish is not the native language of any student," the teacher adds proudly.

Although the bulk of the work was done during the first quarter, the students have continued to create the headlines page at the end of each month. For example, in the June material, the children have incorporated the water children, the beach trip, and the al fresco dinner for students, teachers, and families. All the course pages have been bound to create a single material, which is found in the school library and available to the entire educational community.