How A Year 6 Class Went About Producing A Community Magazine

I have been working with the teachers at Pahiatua Primary School (in the Manawatu) since the beginning of 2025 on ways of teaching students to become writers.  From the Teacher Only Day that began our project, Luke Harding (team leader and Year 6 classroom teacher) and Katrina Gavigan (deputy principal and Year 6 teacher) thought carefully about the notion that I put forward that ‘students writers need a real-life purpose for writing’ if they are to be effective writers. 

They combined their thinking about this with a recognised need for teachers to promote student agency.  Subsequently, they proposed to the 41 students in their team that they produce a magazine for the community that contained work from all of them and that they took responsibility for producing it.  The students accepted this challenge enthusiastically and the 35-page glossy magazine (What’s Up In Pahiatua) has just been published (June 2025).

 Assembling The Magazine

Their first step was to examine and analyse a range of magazines that Luke and Katrina brought into the class.  They guided their students into recognising all the different components of a magazine (for example, articles, fiction writing, reviews, interviews, puzzles, advertisements, artwork, photographs) and all the different jobs that students would need to undertake to produce a magazine (for example, to act as writers and reporters, artists, photographers, designers, procurers of advertising, designers of puzzles).  From the outset, it was agreed that the teachers would have the ‘final say’ on what would go into the magazine but they were determined to give their students as much agency as possible in producing it.

The students then opted to place themselves in production teams and the work in earnest began.  

As organised and encouraged by Luke and Katrina, some students wrote non-fiction articles about Pahiatua issues, some wrote pieces of creative or personal or memoir writing, some developed puzzles, some undertook interviews, some supplemented others’ writing with artwork, some went into the community to sell advertising, and some took ultimate responsibility for the design and layout of the magazine.

Advertising Covered The Costs Of Printing

Those students who elected to go into the community to sell advertising were doing a particularly important job.  The quarter-page/half-page/full-page advertisements that they procured from local companies (no company turned them down and most requested the students to design the advertisements for them) covered the costs of printing fully.   

Now the magazines are printed and ready to be distributed.  Early in Term 3, it is proposed that local businesses (especially those who advertise in the magazine) will be given copies to use as ‘give aways’ for their clients.  It is envisaged, for example, that when you go into the sushi shop to pick up your order, you’ll also be able to take away a magazine about your town.  The students recognised from the outset that this was to be a community magazine, so they are proud that it is about to go into the community. And Luke and Katrina have achieved their goal that students be given a real-life purpose for writing and that they have agency in undertaking an authentic and exciting task.

View the full PDF and Video

The full PDF magazine (36 pages 87.6 MB) has been shared online by teacher Luke Harding from Pahiatua School.

Click here top open the PDF.

You may also be interested in watching and listening to a video that Luke put together of students talking about the process of putting a magazine together.  You will undoubtedly pick up how excited they were about their work.