Hold the front page

GCSE History students made the most of a fantastic opportunity to visit the Guardian Education Centre in London to take part in a workshop as a useful enrichment activity to support an IGCSE unit they will be studying next term.

The session began with an introduction to race relations and the fight for civil rights in the USA during the 1950s and 1960s. The girls were then required to work in pairs creating a newspaper front page using original archive news stories from The Guardian and Observer from the 1950s and 1960s. The girls had to choose three events, organisations, characters or themes to write about, then designed their page layout, edited their reports, wrote the headlines, designed a masthead, and printed their paper to a deadline.

The following is a report on the experience from one of the girls involved:

“Upon our arrival at the Guardian we were greeted by our host for the day and guided through the busy corridors to where we would be working.

Our task was to produce the front page of a newspaper and we had to write about stories and cases related to the civil rights movement in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s. This was fitting for our group as the civil rights movement is a topic we will be studying as part of our GCSE course.

For our task we had to act as editor, designer, journalist and publisher all at once in order to get our front pages completed successfully. Our host talked us through tips and skills we would need in order to produce eye-catching and knowledgeable articles. We covered everything from headlines to pictures and our “skyline”.

By the end of the day all groups met the deadline and had created their front pages. Articles included pieces about Martin Luther King, Emmett Till and the Klu Klux Klan.

We left the Guardian having learnt some useful new skills at the end of what had been a hugely interesting day.”

Grace P (Year 11 and History Subject Leader)