Introduction

Before the lesson, consider the content that you would like your students to write about in the main activity, which is creating a newspaper front page.

Start off by recapping the previous lesson, and asking the children to go back to 2Type and repeat an area they feel they need more practise on. That may be one of the getting started sections, or focusing in on something like using the shift key for capital letters, or trying out another of the longer challenges.

 

Publishing in a particular style

In this lesson the students are going to move onto the publishing tool 2Publish in Purple Mash.

 

 

We will be creating newspaper front pages. Discuss with the students what they already know about newspapers. What might you see on the front page of a newspaper? What is a headline?

Open the 2Publish and choose the Read All About It template.

 

 

When your page loads, ask the class to have a look around the screen and the way the page is set out. Ask - What do you notice? What do you think the different boxes on the page are for?

 

 

Newspaper features

Discuss some of the main features of a newspaper front page:

• Newspaper title - ‘Masthead’
• A title for the main story - ‘Headline’
• Pictures
• Text to tell the story
• Who wrote the article(s) - ‘Byline’

What needs to be special about the masthead and headline? Why do they need to stand out?

Demonstrate adding a masthead and headline. Notice that Purple Mash automatically zooms into the part of the page you are working on.

 

 

You can also move the screen using the scrolling bars at the side and bottom of the screen. Click away from a box to zoom back out to see the full page. There are also manual zoom controls in the bottom right of the screen.

What if I wanted to change the way the text looks, how could I do that?  Explain that this is called formatting. Although it is not always necessary to highlight the text with 2Publish (you can just click in the box and the same formatting is applied to everything in it), demonstrate doing it this way and showing how to click before or after the word and drag the mouse cursor over the word to highlight it - ‘This tells the computer which bit we want to format’. This is common practise in all other more ‘grown up’ word processing tools and it is technique worth teaching from the start.

 

The formatting options will automatically appear at the top of the screen when you click in a text box.

 

 

Here you can choose from bold, italic and underlining, justifying options, font size and font family, colour of the text and text highlighting and also an auto-fit option to make sure your text always fits in the boxes. Click on the font family box, what do you think these are for? Why might I want to change this? Explain that fonts all have names known as font families. Changing the font can change the way your work looks and the style of it, for example, to look more serious or light hearted, modern or old fashioned. Changing the colour can also lend to these effects.

 

 

Adding images

Once they’ve added a masthead and headline for the article, move onto the images. What images should we use? What does it need to do? (be relevant to the story and get people’s attention). As you click in a picture box the drawing tools will automatically appear on the left. You can choose between the basic pens or more advanced drawing tools, we'd recommend the latter. 

 

 

You can then just draw in the picture boxes. You also have the option to add clip art. Use the categories to search and drag it in. This can be used alongside your own drawings.

 

 

Point out the Undo and Redo options which are really useful for correcting mistakes.

 

 

There are also other options for adding images. As you click on the image box you'll see these options, which can let you add images, clear images or drawings, edit the background and border, the order of object layers and more.

 

 

The first icon can also be used to add clip art, as well as other images you have created and saved with other Purple Mash apps, or even images you have saved on your computer. Click Add image.

 

 

Then Choose file

 

 

And select the image from your My Work section or from your PC.

 

 

Click Open and then use the slider to zoom the image to fit in the box, or to zoom to the part of the image you wish to show. Finally, click OK to add it to the page.

 

 

 

Add your article text and format it to ensure it is all in the same font. If needed, an important skill to teach is copying and pasting, and with it, the universal keyboard shortcuts that make this much faster.

If they need to move text from one box to another, highlight the text to be moved and then press Ctrl + X together at the same time on the keyboard, this will cut it (you can also right-click it and choose cut). Then click your mouse cursor in the position that you want to move the text to and press Ctrl + V to paste it.

It’s worth also mentioning at this point that Ctrl + C is copy and Ctrl + Z is undo. Those four keys are good shortcuts to start with and quite easy to remember because they are grouped together on the keyboard.

 

Save your work

When your page is complete save your work.

 

 

Plenary

If you have time, open up a couple of examples of the children's work if they are happy to share with the class (or use one you have prepared yourself). Ask the class - How have they formatted their text? Which part of the page is the headline? 

Think about your own work - did you use two hands for typing today? Did you use the shift key for capital letters? Did you successfully add an image to your work?