KOCHI: When most youngsters settle to buying more books and when schools make do with book exhibitions on World Reading Day, the students of Government High School at Willingdon Island came up with the novel idea of publishing their own newspaper. The highlight of the event is that 43 students of the school published 43 different newspapers each.
Vishnu Raj C S, the headmaster in charge of the school, said that when most schools organise reading competitions they wanted to do something different which ensured that in depth reading is involved on the part of the students.
“This is how the idea to make each student prepare their own newspaper came up. We gave these students newspapers from the past one week, both English and Malayalam. They were asked to go through all of them and select a news item of their preference and copy them onto their handmade newspapers and stick pictures of the news.”
Complete with mastheads, headlines, subheadings and captions the students from standard I to X created their newspapers. The newspapers came in the size of a chart paper, some with three pages and some ten. “The high school students came out with ten pages for each of their newspapers and the younger students had lesser number of pages. Each of the 43 newspapers had 43 names,” said Vishnu Raj.
Jaison James, a standard VIII student who named his paper ‘Deepam’ says,“My paper had 5 pages which covered Sports, Local, Regional and International news. It was an excellent experience and all of us read many newspapers in detail.”
The newspapers were published in the presence of the teachers some of them who are also small time poets and writers.
