Your students are staring at blank screens because nobody taught them how to write a lead. Not a summary, not a paragraph — a lead. The kind that tells you what happened, who it happened to, and why you should care, in one sentence, before you’ve had a chance to think about it. You know the assignment is due Friday.
You don’t have a lesson for it.
Most journalism teachers figure this out through trial and error — give students a news story to imitate, grade the results, and explain what went wrong.
That works eventually.
What speeds it up is showing students that a lead has a job to do, not a formula to follow. Once they understand they’re answering a reader’s first question before the reader asks it, the mechanics start to make sense. Everything else in journalism — AP Style, interview technique, story structure — follows from that same idea: your reader shouldn’t have to work.
There’s a free AP Style worksheet on dates, times, and ages if you want something concrete for Monday — three exercise types, answer key included, runs about one class period.
If you need more than one day’s fix, the Complete High School Journalism Curriculum Bundle has 69 resources covering a full year: lead writing, AP Style, interview technique, ethics, photography, 243 daily bell ringers, and two pacing guides built for teachers who didn’t train for this role. Everything opens and works immediately.
Starmaker English and Journalism Tools 
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