The journey of a Picture News tube!

Have you ever wondered about how our weekly tubes are put together and what goes on behind the scenes at Picture News HQ? If so – this post is for you! We’re going to show you some pictures from our workshop and explain in a little bit more detail about the processes that go on before the pack reaches our schools!

The ideas

1. The story! Arguably, the hardest part of producing our packs, thinking of the news story for the week ahead and most importantly the learning that can be gained from it. We try to keep the news we cover as positive as possible and use something that will be of relevance and interest to the children who will be learning from it. Alongside the poster image, we also need to produce the assembly plan, KS1, KS2 resources, British values link and useful websites. These are all completed once the image, question and story have been chosen.
   

   Printing

2. Printing It takes around 10-12 hours to print all of the posters for our schools so as soon as the image is ready – our printer has its chance to shine! Lots of people think that the poster are printed on sheets but they are actually printed on large rolls – the image below shows  a 6 month supply of poster rolls!
   

   Poster rolls

3. Numbers we use a very detailed database to ensure we are printing and posting the right numbers of packs in any given week. This will then make it much easier to generate our labels.
4.  Preparing Once the posters have started printing, we then print all the additional resources. We have 2 additional printers for these, we also have 4 paper cutters to help prep all of the resources and we get through around 600 paperclips each week!
   

   Rolling the packs

5.  Tubes We like to vary the colours of the tubes we send through to schools and each week we will pick the colour we are going to use! Once all of the resources have been prepared and checked, they we be individually rolled and added to the tubes.
   

   Preparing the resources

6. Labels We use a trusty label printer to print our all our school names and addresses, once completed these can then be added to each of the tubes.
7. 

   Labels

   Post bag Once the tubes have been packed and labelled they all go into postal bags ready for postage! The bags can hold 50 tubes so we use lots of bags each week for our tubes!