An introductory news literacy curriculum for middle school students as well as a variety of other lesson plans and resources for teaching news literacy are available from the American Press Institute.

The curriculum, which consists of three units of media literacy activities and lessons, is a condensed and modernized version of the High Five 2012 integrated language arts and journalism curriculum. The units each take about one or two weeks of class time to teach.

The High Five 2012 curriculum was developed by the Newspaper Association of America Foundation with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The American Press Institute revamped the curriculum to meet the needs of time-pressed teachers.

The integrated nature of the curriculum addresses reading, writing, journalism, grammar, linguistics and visual literacy. The first unit covers five media principles. The second unit focuses on the ethics of journalism, analysis of news sources and writing different news text structures. The third unit examines the creation of a news publication.

Lesson topics include:

• Media’s purposes
• Newspapers, the Internet and me
• The First Amendment, school-based publications
• Quotations and interviewing
• News stories, feature stories and editorials
• Planning the newspaper

The curriculum meets national standards for reading/language arts and news literacy and is correlated to the Common Core State Standards. Designed to be taught in its entirety or as standalone units, the curriculum is highly flexible.

To access the lessons and a list of many other resources, including a guide to creating student newspapers and a social media toolbox, visit API’s news literacy curriculum page. A variety of instructional tools can also be found SchoolJournalism.org.