So much of my summer is spent at the ball field or watching baseball games on TV. How about you?
Given the wide popularity of all kinds of sports, why not harness students’ sports interest into classroom learning?
Developing Contemporary Literacies through Sports: A Guide for the English Classroom shares meaningful and productive ways to engage students in reading, writing, and other literacy practices. It’s a collection of lessons and commentaries—from established teachers, teacher educators, scholars, and authors—and its companion website provide numerous resources that support teachers in developing students’ contemporary literacies through sports.
Tune in to this ReadWriteThink.org podcast episode to hear about works of sports fiction and nonfiction that explore issues of identity and belonging, courage and equal rights, and changes over time in American history and culture.
We’ve all heard the expression “poetry in motion.” This activity gets children writing poems about grace and movement using photos of athletes.
In “Swish! Pow! Whack! Teaching Onomatopoeia Through Sports Poetry” students explore poetry about sports, looking closely at the use of onomatopoeia. After viewing a segment of a sporting event, students create their own onomatopoeic sports poems.
Through the retelling of the 1941 baseball season, children will see two legendary players as characters in “Batter Up! Telling Sports Stories With Trading Cards,” and can create trading cards that highlight these players.
Invite students to look at different online baseball trivia questions to see how they are written. Then, as part of this activity, have them write their own questions and play a trivia game.
Let sports be a way into literacy in your classroom!