Ashlyn and Owen busy working on their poetry article for the upcoming issue of Happy Heights Herald.--NEWS PHOTO SAMANTHA JOHNSON
reporter@medicinehatnews.com
Michelle Warmink, teacher at River Heights Elementary School, and her teaching partner Karen Barnes Olechowski started the Happy Heights Herald with their Grade 3 students back in September.
The two teachers wanted students to be excited about what was happening in the school and have a way of connecting them with the community and their families.
Their idea was to have the kids write short articles about events and the newspaper has grown from there.
“It got bigger and bigger as we went on. We found someone who was willing to print it for us. Then they wanted to put it out in the community. It’s really exciting,” stated Warmink.
When the News visited, the students were busy with their brainstorming pages, which had the who, what, where, when and why questions on it. The students answer the questions for their articles, either through interviews or research, and once done they write the article.
“When they are on their brainstorming page, they might be all around the school,” explained Warmink. “They might have different teachers to interview if they are doing a teacher feature. One of the articles is school art, so they feature a bulletin board of school art each month. They’ll talk to students who are putting on different events.”
The next issue will have a piece about the River Heights Clothing Store that recently went online. The paper covers things in the classroom as well as features about the school. More than 25 groups of students, each with a different topic, help fill the monthly paper. Each month they create a master list of events and ideas, as well as regular pieces: teacher feature, a sports trivia – one of the favourites – hot lunches for the month, school art display and joke of the month.
Each student was wearing an orange Happy Heights Herald T-shirt, which match the colour of the header on their newspaper. The shirts were a project the students completed in December and developed during a field trip to Medicine Hat High School.
“It was great. The Grade 3s with the older kids came up with different designs that had Happy Heights Herald reporter on them. There were all different types of choices and they voted on the one they liked the best,” said Warmink.
Along with language arts (complete sentences) and social studies (fact, opinion, local and global citizenship) outcomes, Warmink likes how working on the paper at the end of each month helps solidify what is done in the classroom.
“It helps them tie in a little more on what they’ve done and be able to remember what they’ve been working on. Thinking about what’s been important and why we might be learning things.”
Owen and Ashlyn were working on a poetry article together. “We did our autobiography poems, it was sentences about ourselves. After we were done that, we typed it on our Chromebooks,” explained Owen.
Ashlyn continued, “We started shape poems and we put it on a black piece of paper.”
When asked to elaborate on a shape poem, Ashlyn explained, “You draw a shape, like a basketball or flower, then you write a poem around it.”
Both students like poetry. Ashlyn thinks many of her classmates have become better at writing. The hardest part for both is trying to find the right keys on the Chromebook, but Ashlyn said typing.com helps.
The next issue of Happy Heights Herald will be available the first week of April.
