"I want to tell you about the thrashings Barça gave Real Madrid."

Barcelona"When Donald Trump was returning from his morning prayers and heading towards the golf course, he slipped while hitting a ball. At that very moment, a member of his staff pushed another, who ended up falling on top of a third worker carrying a tray with a glass of wine. Trump bled to death. Why, curiously, was there no doctor on duty? Quim is in fifth grade and is one of the children who participate in the after-school program." Little journalists At the Baixeras School, near Via Laietana in Barcelona, the program, which began this school year and is subsidized by the Catalan Government's Department of Language Policy, is organized by Fundesplai in collaboration with ARA. It takes place in eight schools, serving a large number of newly arrived students between the ages of 9 and 12 who are interested in learning about the journalism profession. Four of the schools are located in Barcelona and the other four in the metropolitan area. "I have two types of students: those who are passionate about journalism and those who struggle with the Catalan language, and the course helps them improve their writing and speaking skills," explains the instructor, Oriol Domingo, a fourth-year journalism student at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). "What I do is adapt the different activities to all levels," adds Domingo, who has worked in various local media outlets and also teaches this extracurricular program at three other schools.

Quim, Guillem, and Lorenzo are the first type of students. In fact, they explain that they make a homemade school magazine, of which they've already finished a couple of issues, but which they've put on hold for now. "We write about things that happen in the playground, in class, or with the teachers; we also add some comics and puzzles," says Guillem, who is also in fifth grade. What he likes most about this project is "coming up with ideas for the newspaper" and the photography and music sections. Quim, on the other hand, prefers the layout and the poll, which they've also incorporated into the magazine: "I suggest an idea, and then we ask our classmates what they think during recess."

Today they're writing a news article about the Basilica of Santa Maria del Pi in Barcelona. "We have to include the section, the headline, the text, the caption, the author of the news story..." explains Irene, who prefers watching the news on television to reading it in the newspaper. The class visited the basilica last week and, in addition to taking notes on what they saw to write the article, they also took photographs with cell phones provided for the occasion to illustrate the text. To help them with their work, the instructor also gives them a sheet with information about the basilica, such as details of its construction.

Quim, Guillem, and Lorenzo, who show predilection Because of the news reports, they have opted this time to resort to imagination again and explain how the Virgin's head falls on a visitor to the church. The three admit that they read few newspapers. "I look at the newspaper The Raval "And at my grandmother's house, I have fun drawing little pictures with markers on the faces of the politicians in the newspaper she buys," he says. Nine-year-old Mustafà preferred to set his imagination aside and write a more historical news report about the temple. The photograph he took was of the large rose window on the facade. The second project focuses on radio, where they will participate in a voice workshop and create and record a program. The final project will be for television, where they will learn how to stand in front of a camera and follow all the steps involved in recording a news report.

Today there are eleven students in class, and when we ask them if they would like to go into journalism, most aren't too sure. Only Mustafa is certain, and he wants to be a sports journalist for a newspaper to report on "Barça's thrashings of Real Madrid." Naïma, 11 years old, on the other hand, prefers to follow a different path. "I'm enjoying the extracurricular activity and learning a lot, but I want to be a doctor," she states clearly.

What this group is more or less clear about is what kind of news story they would like to report. The two most common choices are the end of a war or the (generous) victory of their favorite sports team.

They finish today's session with a game: one student has to discover what news story the rest of the class has invented by asking questions where the answers can only be one. Yeah or one NoHe had to receive the President of the United States again. The headline read: "Trump chokes to death on cat fluff."