Kiwi kids make winning headlines

Ponsonby Primary School. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey

Kiwi kids made headlines in all the right ways this week, with Auckland primary school teams beating 194 entries nationwide to take five of the 10 top prizes for their creativity in this year's Design a Front Page awards.

Ponsonby Primary students led the talent, with two teams of Year 6 boys winning the school a total of $2000 for their front page designs - the school's third win in three years.

Newspapers in Education, which encourages current affairs literacy in schools worldwide, has run the front-page competition in New Zealand for the past four years.

Creative challenges for the teams included writing local news stories, designing layout and advertisements, taking photos and contemplating "good sportsmanship" in their newspapers' editorials.

The Ponsonby boys were excited to have won the chance to meet Warriors league players with eight other New Zealand primary and intermediate school news teams.

Budding reporter George Shirtcliffe, 10, was looking forward to meeting his league heroes, and said he was "keeping his options open" - tossing up between a career in journalism or engineering.

He enjoyed reporting on Auckland city councillors' antics the most.

"I like interviewing people. I think it's really fun kind of looking behind the scenes to find out things I didn't really know."

The two Ponsonby Primary teams will be joined by students from Auckland's Hauraki, Stanley Bay and KingsGate schools and five other schools from around New Zealand, who will each pick up $1000 and individual prize packs at an awards ceremony hosted by the Vodafone Warriors players next month.