Although news or sharing time is a regular curriculum activity in many Australian K-2 classrooms, it has remained an undertheorised and often 'ad hoc' component. Educational writers and researchers have suggested that newstime provides children with an interface between home and school while facilitating opportunities for oral narrative as a precursor to literacy development. Research in Australian classrooms to date has characterised newstime as a curriculum 'genre' or a staged, purposeful context for learning but has neither investigated teacher purposes in programming newstime, nor its impact on children and their learning. The current study of newstime was articulated in three interrelated developmental phases aiming to develop a rich and layered description of this fragment of the curriculum. These were: three case studies in kindergarten classrooms in Sydney; a statewide survey of newstime practices and purposes amongst K- 2 teachers; and an ethnographic study in a kindergarten classroom in which newstime practice was examined from teacher, student and parent perspectives. Findings from all three phases of the research suggested tensions between the pedagogical purposes of newstime cited by the literature, teacher intentions in programming newstime and the actuality as it occurred in classrooms. Technical routines and rituals were found to be inhibiting interactive, child centred discussions in some classrooms. Findings also demonstrated that, rather than describing newstime as one particular kind of curriculum genre, a range of different learning contexts were being constructed. Further, if oral narrative is important in the development of literacy, it was not seen by K-2 teachers as an important reason for programming newstime nor was this purpose recognised by the children and parents interviewed in phase three of the study. Using newstime as an exemplar demonstrates how the construction of taken for granted elements of the curriculum may provide valuable insights into the explicit and implicit lessons children are learning about school knowledge from the very beginning of their formal education. Further research needs to explore the construction of curriculum from all participants' perspectives.