Most of us have heard over and over in the media that our students are lagging in reading and writing skills. It’s been said that poor writing skills is a problem for employers looking to hire graduates. Without these critical skills, it can be an unsuccessful future for our students. As a parent of three children, I have experienced it first hand. Trying to find the hook, to keep the child interested seems to be the biggest challenge.
Using the web as a resource is something many schools are adding to their mix. Integrating the internet into home school and the classroom may be worth a try. The internet has a huge amount of information resources and could help, if used wisely. A parent or teacher could post the internet address and bookmark it for the student. Provide a clear assignment choice of reading independently or in small groups as well as perhaps assign a writing task.
Students can become excited and proud to see their work featured and published! Many websites now offer the opportunity to publish stories, articles and even photos or video clips. We took the time to buy numerous sport domain names and created a portal web address to bring all of them into one place for free and easy access. AdventureZONEsports has language translation in place for English, French, Dutch/German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish and has stories, articles and video clips to watch about different sports. The website opens up to an article publishing page and links to stories and video clips on different sports. Once a story or article is properly written the article submit feature allows the student to become a published author. As the students skills get better and better, they can be proud and excited to show family and friends their online writing.
The sports collection consists of archery, ATV, basketball, cycling, dirtbike, dodgeball, fencing, iceboating, kayak, landsailing, motorcross, mudracing, rafting, rodeo, rowing, sandboarding, skateboarding, skating, skiing, snowmobiling, snowshoe, softball, squash, and waterski. Some of these sports are considered different or extreme and people of all ages can be interested and learn about sports that they have never tried. For example, how much do you know about landsailing, iceboating or sandboarding? In addition, there are sports such as basketball, cycling and winter sports that will allow the student a weekend assignment to participate by choosing one of the activities and create a written report the following week. The report can be edited, and submitted with author name for publication on the website.
There are currently stories, articles and video clips to keep the students attention. The best method of writing and submitting an article is to work on several drafts of the story before entering it into the submit page. To prevent spam all articles must be reviewed by a human editor first before appearing on the website. The student is notified as the story is published and appears on the website for all to view.
