
14 Mar Big day of reporting for our Year 7 BBC Young Reporters
Written by Kim, Alesha, Siah and Vedahasa, Year 7 student reporters
It’s our BIG DAY of reporting from the Year 7 BBC Young Reporters. We started Whitley Academy back in September 2018, having had little experience in media and reporting, now we’re a team off 22 young reporters who love investigating stories, and we always stand as a team. We always aim high and try to achieve our goals, and it’s now time to show off our work! As people often say: ‘practise makes perfect’, so we started planning for our main news report quite a number of weeks ago. We have all worked in our spare time to put together, edit and check our entries to make sure they are the best!
One of the stories we have chosen for our big day was about school timing. We hope you are aware, that recently in the news there has been some debate that schools in England should start at 10am, instead of our usual time of 8.50am. Well, three amazing Young Reporters, Carter, Gosia, and Kiera have worked together to present their findings on this subject. They found that over 185,000 signatures have been presented to the government in a petition to allow schools to start at 10am, quite a shocking stat!
We were pleased with our report, and as we hope you can see from the video, we prepared filming very thoroughly, and chose quiet moments in the school to record (which was a challenge). Never say you can’t, because you can, and you will.
Now, moving on we want to give you a little story about the interview we filmed with Eme and Hanako, students from our international partner school in Hiroshima, Japan. These students had come to our school for a placement of two weeks, to learn about our daily school routines, lessons, and life. Many of their new experiences were organised by pupils and staff here at our school, and we were very proud to show them what our school does well!
We asked the visiting students many questions, and eventually stumbled upon the fact that they had never heard the words ‘fizzy drinks’ or ‘chips’! How amusing! It was a great experience for us too though, as we got to know them, and what life was like in Japan a little better. It was the first time our team of reporters has filmed a live interview, and we did it as naturally as possible. Alok, our camera man, was very proud of his work!
Thank you for reading our blog and see you in our next project!