My Words, My World: a journalistic writing challenge for secondary schools

Tap into your students’ passions with this motivating and structured journalism challenge. This writing challenge will take students through the steps, from research, planning and writing a feature article for a newspaper or magazine about an issue they are passionate about. 

The following resources are available:

• My Words, My World: Non-fiction feature writing teaching resource. A framework for teachers to support pupils to research, plan and write a high quality feature article about an issue they are passionate about.

• My Words, My Worlds journalists. Find out more about the journalists supporting the challenge and read some of their work.

• Film clips of the journalists talking about their work, what motivates them and what makes a good feature article. Great to use as a stimulus for discussion to focus students’ attention before they begin to write.

• Example feature articles. Use these example articles, kindly contributed by our journalists and young people’s news providers First News and The Day, to help your pupils understand the structural and language features of a feature article:

• MPs’ fury over the ‘national scandal’ of FGM from The Day (download from the list on the right)

• In Swaziland, Coca-Cola has the power to make democracy the real thing by Maurice McLeod for The Guardian 

• Loneliness ‘epidemic’ plaguing young people from The Day 

• Every child deserves an education from First News (download from the list on the right)

• Is your child a "little Buddha"?: How spoiling our children is making them lazy brats by Judy Yorke for The Mirror

These resources were produced in partnership with the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) for a competition we ran in 2014.