Junior Journalists Enrichment Program

Rationale
Writing is the most liberating form of expressing one’s thoughts, insights,
and onions. Indeed, writing is the highest invitation of a learned individual to
articulate his or her thinking in a creative and profound manner. The Grades
School Department of Colegio San Agustin – Makati believes in this philosophy,
and continues to challenge its constituents to chronicle personal experiences and
respond to societal issues through writing. In fact, The Grade School publication
The Augustinian Mirror, as well as its supplementary literary folio, Prism, serves
as mouthpiece of the students’ genuine articles and literary pieces. Thus, the
Junior Journalists Enrichment Program is designed to prepare students to
become responsible and critical campus writers, and effective leaders as well.

Objectives
The Junior Journalists Enrichment Program seeks to:
1. provide a venue for the students with innate writing skills to hone their
talents to the fullest;
2. develop students with high writing interest to become competent and
flexible writers;
3. expose students to the different literary and journalistic genres;
4. publish articles with excellent quality;
5. form students who write critically and responsibly f their environment
and the world at large; and
6. train students to become effective leaders by autonomously manning
the school publication.

Scheme/Procedures for Choosing the Participants

Exclusively offered to grades five to seven students, the program is
comprised of two groups, namely: the apprentice and the advanced group.
Students who have writing interest are tapped to enlist in the regular Junior
Journalist Club as part of their co-curricular undertaking as prescribed by the
Student Activity Program. The members are classified as apprentice learning the
basic journalism skills. They may serve as correspondents to the school organ,
and get their works published upon the discretion of the editorial staff. An
apprentice with exemplary writing skills may be promoted to the advanced group
for further training and more complex writing tasks.
The advanced group is comprised of highly qualified students writers who
are either promoted from the apprentice group or recommended by the Reading
and Language teachers based on classroom performance. This group undergoes
extensive training as student journalists equipped with varied and useful literary
and journalistic skills. The advanced group holds they key positions in the school
publication as editors and staffwriters exercising the autonomy to plan, decide,
and produce magazines, newsletters, and literary folios with the supervision of
the technical adviser appointed by the school principal.
To identify the set of editors and staff for a given school year, the
members of the advanced group attending the summer writing workshops go
through a competitive editorial exams on news, editorial, and features. The
entries are judged by the screening committee composed of five grade school
teachers upon the recommendation of the Principal.

Characteristics
A. Content
The apprentice group learns the basic journalism and literary skills,
which include: news, features, editorial, sports, poetry, and short story
writing.
On the other hand, the advanced group has extensive and complex
writing tasks such as investigative writing, cartooning, copyreading, and
formulating commentaries on significant local and international issues.
The advanced group regularly attends summer writing workshops to
reinforce higher writing skills, and to train them on effective campus paper
management. They participants undergo staff development training
 program like taking refresher course on basic campus journalism,
evaluating magazine issues published the preceding years, and
brainstorming ways on how to improve the content, lay-out and form and
style of the school organ.

B. Strategies
Varied or holistic strategies are employed in the training, though
techniques at times are dependent to the genre taught. During the pre-
writing stage, students are exposed on the elements of a certain genre
through examples, analysis, and interactive discussion of the text, theme,
style, and format. Following the modified four-pronged approach to writing,
the students then deconstruct the given samples by changing parts of the
text or supplying other alternatives such as introduction, ending, or
specific lines as in the case of poetry. This will prompt the kids to mimic
and later on formulate their own style with increased awareness on the
elements of the given genre. In the actual writing activity, guide questions
are set to direct the students focus to certain goal or theme in writing. Yet,
the most intensive and critical are the post-writing activities, wherein
editing, revising, and finalizing of the draft are thoroughly done through the
guidance of the training facilitators. Here, various steps are undertaken
such as peer and group checking and student-facilitator conferences. The
latter is often times the most effective since students have the equal
opportunity to discuss their works individually with the facilitators for
improvement and further revisions. The final draft is submitted to the
section editors for final editing and publishing with the approval of the
technical adviser.

C. Expected Outcome
As campus journalists, they are trained to develop commitment to
work, responsibility, decision-making, teamwork, and become effective
Augustinian leaders.
 Primarily, the members of this program, after being exposed to the
elements of campus journalism, are expected to produce quality writing
output worthy for publication in the school organ.
The trainees are also encouraged to join interschool competitions
and other writing conventions to develop self-confidence and to exhibit the
Augustinian talents inside and outside the campus.
Nevertheless, writing is not only exclusive to the members of the
Junior Journalists Enrichment Program. Students across the department
are encouraged to contribute poems, short stories, and essays to be
published in the magazine issue, newsletters, or literary folio through the
help of the subject teachers. This is way to also discover their writing
abilities at an early stage, and to prompt them to enroll in the Junior
Journalists Enrichment Program.