Use today to finish, revise and improve your writing from yesterday.

Your task was to create the main body of text for a newspaper report. It needed to be three paragraphs.

Use the following checklist to edit and improve your finished piece of writing.

• Have you written about three different ideas which all connect to your overall theme?
• Have you grown each of those ideas, providing detail to support what you are trying to say?
• Have you made sure that you haven't jumped from one idea to another within each paragraph?
• Have you used a variety of sentence types (simple/compound/complex)?
• Have you included examples of direct and indirect speech?
• Have you used cohesive devices to link sentences/ideas within each paragraph?
• Have you used cohesive devices to link paragraphs?

The term 'cohesive devices' refers to the conjunctions, connectives and pronouns used to link the parts of a piece of writing.

• Have you made sure that you have correctly punctuated your sentences?
• Have you used capital letters correctly/
• Have you checked spellings on tricky or unfamiliar words?

Once you are happy with your report, you can write the beginning and ending paragraphs. The introductory paragraph does not need to be long but it does need to use the 5 Ws to give a brief summary of who, what, where, when and (possibly) why the article is about.

The final paragraph is a conclusion that brings the report to an end. It often brings the story up to date or even talks about what might happen next.

Have another look at the example report to see how the writer begins and ends the report?

Things to consider:

• Make sure that you have written in the past tense about things that have happened recently/
• Make sure that your report doesn't sound like a television news report. Remember that you are not speaking to a camera so you shouldn't be saying things like, "Here is....." Stick to past tense.

Once you have finished your report, please email it to me at sarahk@iford-kingston.e-sussex.sch.uk

The following, extra, activities are for if you have time left.

The first is a BBC Bitesize activity, revising the features of newspapers.

The second is from First News and is a selection of news reports for you to sort into the different sections of the paper. Read the articles that interest you and try to spot the different features of news reports.