Earthquake!

We spent today's class looking at the features of news articles.  We want to write the best possible feature stories we can, so we need to know what goes into making a news feature effective, first.

We began with a list of words, and students tried to determine which words were "in" the article and which were "out" of the article, sorting them into two lists.  We talked about which words we thought were in, and why we thought this.  Then, we made a prediction about what we thought the article would be about.

We then practiced our ability to recognize the 5Ws in a lead paragraph.  Students recorded these after reading the opening paragraphs from the article.

Finally, we began to look at the components of the middle of news features.  We noted the Province article used facts and interviews with people to develop the story.  We noted three different facts (which are different from opinions, remember), and we looked at the importance of two different quotations from the article.

We will continue writing our own feature stories next day.