Behind the Scenes of the Village Sting

                             By:Izzy S.

    You read all of these amazing articles, but do you ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes? Reading the article may be easy but making the article is not as easy as it seems. Reporters can make videos, take surveys, or write an article. Sometimes it may even take days to come up with a topic.             

                                  Who Started the Sting?

One of the most important parts of the Sting is the editor. Our amazing editor/founder of The Sting is Mrs.Knudsen. I don't know how she deals with editing all of these stories.  I decided to ask her a little bit about when, why, and how she started the Village Sting.

         Why did you start the Village Sting?

   I wanted to make The Sting so kids can have a way to expose their writing to everyone and not just to each other, but to share it with their school, peers, and parents, and that way everyone can read it.

       How do You Feel When an Article is Published?

    I am very excited when an article is published. It takes a lot of work to build an article from beginning to end. Once it's published I feel a sense of relief, accomplishment, and pride for the person whose writing the article.

    Do you Wish you had other People helping you out with the Sting?

Yes. that's my goal to get more editors. Because the more help we have the more articles we can get published.

     Do you Wish More People Would Get the Chance to work on the Village Sting?

 Yes I do. Because soon we will be switching R.T.I so that way people will have more opportunity to write more articles.

    Do you Want to Make Some changes to the Village Sting?

I am sure that there are changes that we can make to the Village Sting. I am always open for new ideas or suggestions. For example, last year at the end of the year some students asked if they could make videos and, I thought that was a great idea. So, they wrote the article and attached a video to it. I also think that a way to make it better is to have more people see articles by using Twitter. Last year I made a Twitter account for the Village Sting and when the students are publishing it I will post that on the account and hopefully the parents will follow the Twitter account. That way more people will see it.

    Do you like Making Videos in the Maker Space Lab?

     I do. I love to watch the creativity and, especially the collaboration. There is a lot that can go wrong when making a video. As a teacher I love to see how the students problem solve to figure out how to make the videos better.  

       The Steps To Making A Amazing Article

       Writing a article is not the easiest thing in the world.

1. Coming up with the article topic is by far one of the hardest things. To help decide on a topic we think about what is happening in the building.  
2. Writing  on the news board is where we record journalists, topic, and if it needs to be edited or not. It is how we keep things organized.
3. If you are a shy journalist working on the Sting will help you become more confident. You have to pitch your idea to three people. Yes it is necessary. Then you pitch it to Mrs. Knudsen she almost always says yes.
4. Then you start to write your article. It could take one day or two weeks. It is very time consuming.
5. Then comes the editing portion. Nothing is harder than the editing. This process can take 1 day or one week. Mrs. knudsen is our one and only editor. In the interview above she stated that she needs more editors, but, she is one of the best editors in town.
6. Then once your story is all polished up now comes the publishing. This process does not take very long, but it does take a lot of hard work to fit it all onto one column. Mrs. Knudsen normally posts one article at a time. Sometimes, she puts up two. Then you start all over again!

 

                                                                   The Journalists

I decided to do a section on what the journalists like and don't like about the Sting.

Pros 😊	Cons 😈
You get to express your ideas	Wish we had more time
You can find out new things it is a learning experience	The topics are hard to understand
You can put comments on other peoples stories	It is hard to come up with topics
You get the freedom of writing what you want	You can’t  illustrate anything
You can do cool experiments	NOTHING!
Everything	Most of the students I asked did not have a answer
Writing the article

We often work in groups

Researching information

We work in the Maker Space