Start a class newspaper, with AI on the editing desk

Every class is full of things that deserve a reporter: the snail that vanished from the terrarium, the lunchroom record, the teacher who is getting married, the playground football debate. Kids tell these stories anyway, loudly, all at once, at the school gate. A class newspaper turns that racket into a craft: now they are reporters with a homemade press card and a pencil behind the ear.

The format that survives is a humble one: one sheet, both sides, once a month. Not twelve pages that die by issue two. Print it at school or send the PDF to the families, and if the school prefers no photos, illustrate it with drawings, which give it more character anyway.

The sections that never fail

• News of the month: what happened, who was there, what a witness said. Six lines.
• The interview: the caretaker, the cook, the new classmate. Five questions, short answers.
• The poll: one question for the whole class, results in a hand-drawn chart.
• Expert corner: each month one pupil explains something they are genuinely good at, from chess to bogeys.
• Puzzles: a riddle or a word search built by the newsroom itself.

We are the editors of a class newspaper and we are between 8 and 12 years old. We are going to interview [PERSON, for example: the school cook]. Suggest 8 curious questions that cannot be answered with yes or no, ordered from easy to daring, and tell us which one you would ask first to break the ice. We choose the questions and do the asking ourselves.

The division of labour with the AI is the hidden lesson of the project. The AI is the assistant editor: it proposes interview questions, offers three headlines to choose from, finds the mistakes in a finished text and explains why they were mistakes. What it does not do is write the articles, because then the paper would stop telling what the kids saw and start telling what a machine imagines.

This is my article for the class newspaper: [PASTE TEXT]. Do not rewrite it. Point out the spelling mistakes and the sentences that are hard to understand, explain each correction in one line, and suggest three headlines of eight words or fewer for me to choose from.