Why Is It Important to Select the Right Service-Learning Project?

Camp Sharigan is a hands-on, make-believe, wonder-filled reading camp that meets for two hours a day for one week. Treasure hunt maps and colorful banners direct the children to ten exciting workstations that change each day. Mount Reading helps children work their way through “tricky” spelling words as they climb to the summit to find a good book to read. Children practice letter sounds at the Friendship Tree. Children hook on to new adventures at Lake Read with a fishing pole and magnet while they practice puppet plays. There’s also a tent full of buzzing mosquitoes, a grapevine, a campfire, a snake pit with a friendly snake named Sharigan, and a make-believe poison ivy patch that helps the children capture new words. At the camp library, children become the author, write a story, and make a book. At the camp cabins, children make a pop-up book cover for their story. The compass at the Read and Hike Trail points the way to stories hidden under inflatable rocks, while the Road to Nowhere but Reading is lined with funny stories. At the Camp Stop Sign, everyone stops to play a word game, while learning something from a nonfiction book. The pace is lively as each workstation works on remedial reading skills. This will be our service project. Our goal is to make learning fun. The result is to instill a love for reading and make reading a life-long habit. To do so, we must teach children how to read.  A well-planned description gets my students excited on the first day, but selecting a service project that sounds exciting is not enough.  Choosing a service-learning project is more than simply finding a community worksite.