A History of the Blake Bear Bugle

March, 2021, Mr. Passi’s 3rd Grade Wolf Pod

In the height of Covid, when the current 8th graders were 3rd graders, classes were split up into "pods" of 10 students. The Wolf Pod created a newspaper called the Covid Times. Several of the Covid Times contributers later wrote for the Blake Bear Bugle

January, 2022 - Ms. Hales 4th Grade Journalism Unit

Every year, 4th graders do a journalism unit, which culminates in creating a class newspaper.

The Blake Bear Bugle originated from Ms. Hales’ class’s newspaper.

Several Blake Bear Bugle writers, including Lily and Gabriel, first wrote for the newspaper as fourth graders.

Now, we continue our fourth-grade roots by delivering every issue to each of the fourth-grade classes and presenting to them about journalism each year.

2022 to 2023 - Ms. Rainey’s 5th Grade Class

The next year, when our grade became 5th graders, our class decided to continue the Blake Bear Bugle. We met during recess on Wednesdays and released three issues.

We designed the layout for our 5th grade newspaper on Google Slides.

2023 to present - Middle School

In our first weeks as 6th graders, Lily and Gabriel talked with Ms. Kayla Nussbaum about continuing the Blake Bear Bugle as a middle school newspaper. She agreed to be our advisor, and so we began as a middle school newspaper.

In our first year, we decided to split the leadership into Section Editors, who would be in charge of a single section, like sports, arts and culture, and news, among others.

This did not work well at all, and people didn’t commit to putting in work, so we decided to switch to a traditional newspaper leadership system: an Editor-in-Chief to be in charge of everything, with other positions including staff writers, formatters, columnists, comic artists, and writers.