YOUNG news hounds let their imagination run riot when they penned fictional news-paper articles about their teacher.

Year 6 tutor Jessica King set a competition for pupils at Conifers Primary School in Weymouth to devise their own endings to a scenario that featured her eating ice cream and leaning over a gorilla enclosure at Monkey World, near Wareham.

The children rose to the occasion and surprised Miss King with different versions of events, where she fell and was either savaged or saved by the animals.

The teacher, 27, runs booster classes for the pupils, who are sitting their national curriculum tests next week.

She said writing the stories helped them revise how to write articles using paragraphs, quotes and headlines, not just the bare facts.

Miss King split 24 pupils into two classes writing for the made-up Conifers Kidz News and Cool Kidz Club newspapers.

She added: "We made up a story about a school trip going to Monkey World and I asked them what happened next with the band or whoop of gorillas. There were lots of different versions.

"The gorillas gathered round me in a circle and protected me, or let me go when I gave them my ice cream.

"In other stories, I broke my neck or the zookeeper had to shoot one of the escaped gorillas with a tranquilliser gun. Obviously, I would have been very upset if this was real life, but it was so funny reading the articles.

"I thought the children did it really well - they wrote it out in rough then copied it up neatly for me.

"They really got their teeth into it, even making up the headline themselves, which I thought was clever."