The Lal Lal Local editorial committee say it is important children have a space to voice their opinion on the issues they feel matter.
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A four-pupil team led Lal Lal Primary School in creating the free community newspaper, which they said had been flying off the shelf.
Nick Barton, Anna Inglis, Lorelai Henderson and Blake Ryan managed to ensure every pupil at the school contributed in some way, including the junior class in a street poll for the opinion page on whether school breaks should be longer.
“It’s important a student’s voice gets to be heard,” Nick said. “It’s different to when you’re just writing a story for class that you might throw away afterwards. This goes into a newspaper with everyone else who gets a say.”
This goes into a newspaper with everyone else who gets a say
- Nick, grade six
The project was sparked from lessons on factual writing as teachers sought an authentic way to celebrate and bring pupils’ work together.
Anna’s favourite story was written by Lorelai, highlighting what World Diabetes Day is about from personal experience in a human interest piece. Anna said you learnt more about an issue when there was a personal story.
The front page story is about the school’s popular rock band on tour to perform carols for residents at BUPA aged care earlier this month. This included the perils of roadie work.
The Lal Lal Local pulled together community pieces, like the koala who dropped her baby at school, puzzles and creative writing, hard news like Anna’s piece on the wind turbines set for Lal Lal, and sport on the back page.
Blake teamed up with classmate Jake Gear to produce comfort food cooking on a recipes page.
Anna said working on the paper was a good experience to see how much work goes into making a newspaper. Anna worked with her dad most nights on page lay-outs, helping to fit copy.
Lorelai said the hard part was finding the right balance for the paper.
“Sometimes there was double-ups on stories and we had to go with the best, or say well, you’ve got a story on another page so we’ll let this other person’s story go here,” Lorelai said.
For Blake, who enjoys reading and checking pages more than writing, the tough but fun part was manually sticking pages together with masking tape.
They all say the most satisfying moments in newspaper publishing was seeing the final product, reading your own byline and feeling proud when you found others reading your work.
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