The Mayberry Gazette Project Description

This activity revolves around the creation of a hometown newspaper from the town of Mayberry, North Carolina. We were provided a website: www.mayberry.com to review and asked to create a minimum 4-page newspaper with each student in the group writing an article and then each of us creating our own newspaper edition.

 Project Reflection

The Mayberry Newspaper project required imagination. I felt compelled to stick with the Mayberry theme and come up with an idea that was newsworthy and could actually happen in small-town Mayberry, and perhaps be amusing also. It was fun to see what stories everybody came up with, but the generational and pop culture differences were apparent as I didn't know what some of the stories were about! (i.e. Punk'd) Using a platform that allows kids to relate to current pop culture would certainly open up their imaginations.

It took a while to search and find suitable pictures and clipart, although it was very helpful that we had a website related to the topic to begin with. I found quite a few Mayberry photos and wallpaper that I could use. I had read all the stories first so I knew what and who I was looking for. I also needed additional clipart which was readily provided by Microsoft (thank goodness - finding suitable clipart can really be troublesome sometimes). The hardest part of the newsletter was getting the stories to be the correct size and fit on the pages properly. I carried one article from page 1 to page 5 - partly because I thought that looked realistic. I used a newsletter format provided by Publisher which made it easy to layout, but difficult to change - typical of templates. It really took a long time to make the newspaper look reasonable. I have a new appreciation for people who publish newsletters on a regular basis - web pages are so much faster and easier! I'm glad I don't have to worry about how much fits on a page.

I saved the publisher file as pdf so that I could e-mail it to everyone in the class and hopefully they could read it.

Link to the Mayberry Gazette KW edition (pdf)

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