When I took over the journalism program, I got a filing cabinet, not a curriculum. Overhead transparencies gone brittle and yellow at the edges. A mimeograph packet that still had that faint purple-ink smell decades later. A "grammar for reporters" workbook citing an AP Style Guide edition roughly ten editions behind the one on my desk. Worksheets clearly run off a dot matrix printer, the kind where every letter O has a little hole punched through the middle from the print head.
None of it taught inverted pyramid structure in a way a 21st-century teenager could actually use. Kids could define "the 5 W’s" and still couldn’t write a lead that wasn’t buried three paragraphs deep — because the materials teaching it predated most of their parents.
See it on Teachers Pay Teachers — $15.99
I used what I had that first year because I didn’t have a choice, and I knew it wasn’t working while I was teaching it. So I rebuilt it — a hard news/inverted pyramid slideshow with real annotated examples, a lead-writing mini-unit that walks the 5 W’s and H against actual stories, an intro-to-journalism piece for week one, and a rubric that assesses lead, structure, and AP style instead of just "did you turn it in." Built to work together as one sequence, because the mimeograph-and-transparency stack never did.
If your filing cabinet has its own transparencies gathering dust, this is the fix.
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