Non-Fiction Teaching Resources for KS2 and KS3

Journalistic Writing

Junior Journalist Guide – helps students learn and improve reporting skills, interview techniques, headline tricks and lots more with this comprehensive guide

Features of a Newspaper Report KS2 – to help students understand a newspaper’s structure and identify the key characteristics of a newspaper report

Features of a Newspaper Report Terminology Cards – display labels to develop children’s understanding of newspaper and news report terminology. A definition for all terms are provided.

What’s on the Front Page of a Newspaper – to help your pupils understand the features of the front page of a newspaper

What’s in a Newspaper Interview – help your KS2 students identify the key characteristics of a newspaper interview

Journalistic Words and Phrases KS2 – sentence openers and other journalistic words and phrase to share with your class

Newspaper Vocabulary Activity – an activity to help students recognise which sentence openers you might find in a newspaper and those you would not

Newspaper Section Cards – laminate these cards and cut them out. You can use these to give children different sections of First News to review.

Section Sleuth Activity – an activity that tasks students with identifying which sections of First News each news story could feature in and why

Blank Newspaper Front Cover – a front cover template for students to create their own front covers with what they have learnt

Useful Alternative to ‘Said’ – a handy worksheet detailing some alternatives to using ‘said’ when reporting speech with examples

The Inverted Pyramid – use this handy worksheet to explain about the style of writing applied in newspaper articles

Guide to Starting a School Newspaper – a handy guide to starting a student-led school newspaper

Editorial Team Meeting Activity

• Teacher Information – in this activity children have a turn at being the First News Editorial Team. They’ll need to discuss the week’s news stories and decide what they think should make the news and feature on the front cover and in the main headlines page.
• Activity Introduction – an introduction to the activity for classroom whiteboards
• News stories for the Editorial Team Meeting
• Flat plan for the Editorial Team Meeting

Debating & Persuasive Writing

First News Polls
Look out for the news polls in First News and on the First News iHub every week. These questions on a topical dilemma are an excellent starting point for a ten minute classroom discussion.