Journalism Opportunity For Kids

So I like to encourage kids to write, and I think the best way to do this would be to create opportunities for them to write for authentic audience. For this purpose I have launched Alatfaal Express where kids can write about places they have been or the places they like, I promote setting up blogs for kids where they can write for the world to read, I like them to respond to the writech prompts via comments so others can have a look at their work. Now another link in the chain is the Alatfaal Express Daily Newspaper and the good news is that you can participate in it too.

Alatfaal Express Daily Newspaper is a collection of all the tweets with the #alatfaalexpress hashtag in a newspaper like format. All you need to do is via twitter, using #alatfaalexpress hashtag share stories from around the world. Kids can write a short news (on twitter you can only post in 140 characters maximum, this is why it is called micro blogging) or share a link to any website they found of interest. If they want to share a longer news story, they will need to write it first on a blog and then link to it via twitter. It isn’t as complicated as it sounds here (thanks to my writing skills, by the way I would benefit from all these writing prompts a lot too) You can also subscribe to the newspaper (which is updated every 24 hours) to get alerted when the fresh paper is out. You can promote the paper by embedding its widget in your blog like this one on Alatfaal Express Blog.

If you are not already a twitter user, I would advise joining it now. Not only your kids will get to participate in Alatfaal Express Daily Newspaper, you will get a wealth of resources by following educators and homeschoolers from around the world.

I hope you give this project a try, my kids are already typing away weather etc, and are eagerly looking for more things to put in “newspaper” . As with other projects, please refrain from sharing un Islamic material and personal details for your own cyber safety.

I am also planning on publishing monthly ezines (electronic magazines) for kids by kids. If you would rather participate in that project let me know so I can let the ball rolling, Insha Allaah.