answer:I taught a Journalism unit to a similar age group, and adapted a bunch of materials from here: www.highschooljournalism.org/Teachers/Lesson_Plans/Archive.cfm . . We started with the idea of “What makes News News” (Recent, Proximity, Novelty, Prominence, Conflict/Human interest) Then we did a game where they were split into teams and had to identify different parts of the paper – “Tell me the weather in Beijing”... “Give me a who-what-when-where from a sports article” “Who is the editor-in-chief of this newspaper”... etc You can get them the same paper on different days, or even different papers (make sure your questions match..) It’s also great for them to consolidate this by visually labelling different parts of the newspaper (get a bunch of post-its and a front page): Headline, lead paragraph, caption, ... Next we tried out the different writing styles for different parts of the paper. For example, a news article is structured very differently (inverted pyramid format, most interesting detail first (so that the editor can lop off the end if there is no space on that page) from a feature article. And of course it’s different from a editorial / letter to the editor, classified… We also looked at interviewing techniques + a bit of ethics (e.g. do you want to ask leading questions? and when?) .. Finally we put it all together, layout, wrote headlines, photos, etc so they would have a finished product…! Voila. . There are tons of lesson plans in that archive I sent you. A good place to start would be to scroll down to the “Introduction to Journalism” section. There are good handouts in this particular lesson plan that I adapted. I’m also happy to e-mail you my lesson plans if you drop me a line privately. Busy teachers unite!