The book "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" is about a girl named Kit who is interested in journalism during the Great Depression. Read this book to your students, then introduce them to the five Ws of journalism: Who, what, when, where and why. Students can read newspaper articles and identify the five Ws. This leads to an assignment of writing their own articles using their new skills.
Combine physical activity with a writing assignment and teach your students about sports journalism at the same time. Organize a sports event at your school, perhaps with the help of the PE teacher. A teachers versus students touch football game or all-school Olympics are two ideas. Then, have your students take notes as sports journalists during the event and write up an event newsletter filled with their articles to print up and pass out to the participants.
Make journalism a year-long lesson with a monthly class newsletter to be sent home to parents. Each month, assign students to act as journalists, photographers and editors for the newsletter. Hold a staff meeting and decide who will cover which activities in the upcoming month. Make sure each student gets a chance to participate in all the capacities and collect the newsletters to copy and put together as a class book at the end of the year.
Instruct your students to keep their eyes and ears open for community events they can write about in a journalistic style. This will sharpen their awareness of the world around them. Ask your students to choose one community event, even if it's something happening in their own family, to write about for a class newspaper. Introduce them to the five Ws of journalism and have them practice their interviewing skills.