Daily Pioneer News

PLATTEVILLE - For the third year in a row, University of Wisconsin-Platteville composition students designed learning-oriented word games for a literacy festival at Highland Elementary School.

The annual Collaborative Literary Festival Project is the brainchild of UWP English instructor Andrea Cool. Students from her introduction to composition classes designed the festival as part of a service learning project, or an assignment that includes service to the community as part of its rubric.

The assignment guidelines for the projects specified that UWP students should "Create a game that captures Highland elementary students' enthusiasm for reading, writing and learning: make reading and writing (language learning) fun."

Individual teams of three to four people in each composition class worked together to create the games, and then 35 students from the two classes traveled to the grade school on Oct. 7. The festival took place in the hallways of Highland Elementary.

This year's festival theme was "Scholastic's 'Book Fair Safari.'"

Steve Nolan, a UWP freshman majoring in mechanical engineering, worked on a team that devised the "Rhino Relay." Cards with letters from the alphabet were stacked in piles and the Highland grade schoolers raced to build words out of them. Each grade schooler grabbed one letter and ran back to her or his relay team, followed by the next Highland student and so on until the name of an animal was spelled out.

"Most of the time they were playing they were really excited," said Nolan, "and I found it pretty exciting too. My favorite was a little girl who spread out all the letters and kept yelling, 'I need an A, I need an A.'" Highland students spelled out words such as leopard, lion, leaf, and cheetah.

At the end of the "Rhino Relay," grade schoolers were rewarded with a bowl full of candy. "If given the chance, kids take big handfuls of candy," Nolan said.

"We all thought back to the kinds of things we liked to do as kids," said Zach Singer, a freshman majoring in civil engineering, "especially since this was a safari. You really have to go back to your childhood, because if you liked to do it as kid, so will they." Singer's team designed a game that challenged grade schoolers to spell out safari related words by shooting letters with a nerf gun. "They were lined up around the corner to the hall," Singer said of the Highland students, "it was awesome."

The "Safari Smash" was the creation of Cheryl Vollmer, a freshman majoring in music education, and her team. "We had riddles written up for two different age groups," Vollmer said. "One set of riddles was for the younger kids, second grade and down, and another set of riddles was for the older kids from third grade and up." The UWP student team stacked up pyramids of soda cans, each with a picture of a different animal on it - an elephant, a cheetah, a lion and a zebra. When one of the grade schoolers answered the riddle correctly, he or she got to knock the pyramid down.

"I love working with kids and reading stories to them or just playing games with them," Vollmer said, "so this activity was really very fun. We got to help the kids learn their English and had fun while learning ourselves." But Highland students were not the only ones who learned things about the animal kingdom. "When I was making up the riddles, I learned a few things about the animals as well" said Vollmer. "For instance, the cheetah can purr like a cat while inhaling, can run up to 70 to 76 miles per hour, covering 460 miles before they tire, and they go from zero to 68 miles per hour in three seconds."

"The UWP students were very kind and would encourage my daughter to come over and play their game," said Sarah Hennessey, a Highland teacher whose daughter is in kindergarten there. "It was great how the college students would interact with the elementary students. My daughter was so excited when she could spell lion at one of the games. She kept telling me that she could spell lion."

The festival was not just about fun. "The process of developing a learning game mirrors the writing and creative processes," Cool said.

In the initial stages of designing their games, UWP students needed to engaging in brainstorming activities, feedback, research and collaboration. The trial and error aspect of designing a game that would be both fun and educational mirrors the process of revision and editing. At the end of the project, Cool's students wrote a reflective essay on their experiences for a class grade.

"The game really helped me with the sense of working in a community, working with others," Singer said. "Together we had to focus on a plan and work together as a group. We kept building off each other. These are skills that will be very important in my career as an engineer."

Nolan said, "The assignment highlighted the importance of being able to think on your feet, particularly around little kids. It was also an exercise in being creative, understanding what materials were there and what you can do with them. Plus the 'Safari Smash' was a big hit with the Highland kids."

Finally, Cool wanted an assignment that would forge friendships between UWP students. A 1992 alumna of UWP herself, Cool remembers her own composition classes and how these affected her scholastic life. "Because the classes are small and involve one-on-one interaction, the people you meet in your comp classes are often the people you know for the next four years," Cool said. "I wanted to create something that is memorable for my students."

Anyone who would like more information should contact Cool at the English department at (608) 342-1626 or coola@uwplatt.edu.

Contact: Andrea Cool, instructor, UWP Department of English, (608) 342-1626, coola@uwplatt.edu. Written by: Russ Brickey, writer, UWP Department of Public Relations, (608) 342-1194, brickeyr@uwplatt.edu.

Labels: literary festival, UWP omposition students