Photojournalism Unit

Grade 4
April 2017

The Photojournalism Unit was a 10 week project based learning unit. This unit was
adapted for a 4th grade Academic Challenge and Enrichment class. For the unit students were
instructed on the basics of photojournalism, how journalists develop driving questions for
articles, rules for interviewing and writing interview questions, how to request interviews, how to
write articles, and to edit and put together a newspaper. Students chose to write about what they
were interested in and selected the person best fit to interview. This PBL unit gave me the
opportunity to be a teacher as a scholar through deepening the students’ knowledge of journalism
and incorporated technology into the writing process. Technology was used throughout the unit
to write interview questions, formal emails to request interviews, record interviews, type articles,
and format a newspaper. The integration of technology made the entire process more meaningful
to students because they had immediate access to all their work throughout the project. I did have
to modify lessons when students were not achieving the objectives, timing was an issue, or the
project was becoming too complex. I was able to reflect and change my teaching strategies and
content throughout this unit to meet the students needs, especially because there were 2 groups of
4th grade students so I could take what I learned from teaching one group to the other. Overall,
the unit incorporated many ELA standards including writing, speech and language, and reading
informational texts, seamlessly.