By Coach Tom
Children can be very competitive. Everything is fair game, from running race to who can finish eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich first. Most children strive to excel. At Player Development we are trying to channel some of this natural competitive spirit into meaningful educational experiences.
Note: Player Development is a free after-school program organised by the Little League to help children keep their school grades up. The program grew organically to fill needs that were observed in our young athletes, and now, almost 20 years later, Player Development has evolved to focus on special needs children.
So what constitutes a meaningful educational experience? Reading, telling time, counting, and writing are top on our list. Somehow, over the years, we stumbled upon teaching the children how to research a subject and write a story. Sounds like a tough job, but at Player Development, with our secret formula it has become easy.
What’s our secret sauce? Are you ready? We work with The Daily Herald and the stories are published in The KIDS Herald.
To date, since the writing for publication program started, our children have been published 130 times! Yes, 130 stories have appeared in the newspaper, and then later on the internet, since we started in 2019.
So how do you make writing fun? We let the children write about something they like. Our kids love trains. We have 5 train sets for the children to play with at the back of the Little League Ballpark. Each child has to do his/her school work, and read a book (we have lots of Thomas the Tank Engine books) before they get the go-ahead to play. Now the fun part. They can play games or sports or work on a personal project. Learning and writing about an interest for publication in The KIDS Herald became fun!
For a while they were just happy to see their name in print. Once published the child would show off the article and then read it to the others aloud. Soon competitive spirit kicked in. Everyone was working hard for that honor of getting published in our local paper.
Suddenly that wasn’t enough. Why can’t we write for something other than The KIDS Herald?
They had met a tourist. He came from New York and worked as a train conductor. They called him Conductor Steve. Through many e-mail correspondences back and forth the children learned he was also a volunteer fireman, cool right, but also he volunteers at a Train Museum. Then it slipped, he was in charge of the museum’s website and Facebook page and regularly posted train articles. What train articles? That is all it took. Everyone wanted to see their by-line on the website. Since then, 34 of the 130 published articles have appeared on the Oyster Bay Railroad Museum (OBRM) Website.
At Player Development we have a bulletin board where we post the articles that are published. So we just download the web articles and posted them, too. As more of the children got a story on the museum website, it was time to raise the bar.
Hey, the children regularly correspond with another tourist that visited PD, another guy named Steve, so they called him History Steve. He runs website called Trainsarefun.com. “Maybe we could write for him.” The answer was yes! History Steve created a section on the website for Player Development and has publish 16 articles.
This was great. Beginner writers getting published! First it started writing for The KIDS Herald. Then they moved to the OBRM site and finally to website Trains Are Fun. Competition was in full swing, and again it reared its head as more children were published. The BAR had to be raised yet again.
Wait did I say “bar?” The children also have made friends with a man named Joey who lives in Maine, and he is a BAR enthusiast. No not what you are thinking, its the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad. Mr. Joey is a computer guy and he is another train museum volunteer. And get this, he publishes a Magazine called the Maine Line, its about railroading in Maine.
It was not long before letters were exchanged and sure enough one of the children got a story in the Maine Line magazine. Not to be outdone the rest of the gang pitched the idea that they could fill an entire issue of the Maine Line... They did it. You can see a digital copy of the entire magazine Free at https://mainelinemagazine.joeykelleyphoto.com/pdfs/Maine%20Line%20Magazine%20-%20Fall%202022.pdf.
You would think a newspaper, two museum websites and a magazine would keep the children busy enough. Nope, they are still seeking ways to be the first to be published someplace else. There is even talk of a book!
So next time you are reading a newspaper, magazine or an online article about a train, look close. It might have originated with some kids at Player Development in from St. Maarten the land of sun, sea,and salt, where no real trains exist. The only exceptions being toy train sets and a couple of golf-type trolleys made to look like trains that take tourists around Philipsburg. This article is a tribute to how The Daily Herald and others have supported our kids and helped them to be proud to say, I am a published writer! Thanks for the support, and keep reading what comes next!
