Headlines

Newspaper headline writing

Be the newspaper editor. Choose the moments from the book that would sell papers, and write the headline that goes above each one — which forces a whole chapter down into eight words.

Summarising, disguised as fun. A headline is a summary with a word limit and an attitude.

Every word has to earn its place. There is no room to retell the plot.

Prints a blank grid. Five headline boxes for the class to fill in.

Write them on the whiteboard · printing the grid is free

The sheet it prints

The printable headlines sheet — a grid of blank headline boxes.

How do you summarise a text in a headline?

You cut a whole scene down to a handful of words that still carry the event, then put the detail that would not fit into a feature line underneath. Forcing a chapter into eight words is what makes this summarising rather than retelling — there is no room to include everything, so something has to be judged most important.

Why is writing a headline good for summarising?

Because the word limit does the teaching. Asked to summarise a chapter, a child will retell it. Asked for eight words, they have to decide what the chapter was actually about, and every word they cut is a judgement about what mattered.

What makes a good headline?

A strong verb, no wasted words, and the most surprising thing at the front. Compare two headlines for the same scene on the board and ask which one makes you want to read on — children are far better at judging this than at producing it, and judging it first is what improves the producing.

How do you run it on the whiteboard?

Model one badly on purpose — A boy went somewhere and something happened — and let them improve it. Then take a scene everyone knows and collect four or five headlines before choosing. Fifteen minutes, and it works as a plenary as well as a main task.

How do you make it harder or easier?

To start, give the scene and a word bank of strong verbs. Then require a set word count, which is where the real work is. To stretch them, ask for two headlines for the same scene from opposite points of view — the hero's and the villain's — and talk about who writes the news.

From the classroom

Bring in a real front page. Children write headlines that sound like sentences because that is the only model they have, and thirty seconds looking at an actual newspaper fixes more than an explanation does. The other thing worth doing is a ban list on the board — no then, no suddenly, no and. It feels harsh and it is the single change that lifts the quality most, because those three words are what children use instead of choosing.

Try it now

Take the most dramatic scene in the class book and collect five headlines before you judge any of them. Then vote, and make them say why.