FOOTBALL READING # 6

TWITTER PLAYERS

This is the sixth in a series of ten blogs about using the new football season to encourage your children to read.

Twitter is a great way to read about football.

Yes, each chunk of reading is under 140 characters long, but Twitter often spurs you on to read articles or more Tweets.

Today's idea is to encourage your children to follow footballers on Twitter. Do any of their favourite team's players Tweet?

You can find out intersting things like:

* big football stories before they make it into the mainstream media

* what the player things about transfer rumours

* how they feel before the game - and after

* what they are interested in: what newspapers and books they read, what bands they like

* arguments they are having with journalists

* and a lot more

You can follow Tweeting Players at http://www.twitter.com/ or via smart phone devices.

Bear in mind that some footballers swear and say controversial things that you might not want younger (or even older) children to read about. To solve this you could choose footballers who are cleaner - or edit out any of the more risque tweets.

Here are some players you can follow:

@rioferdy5 - Rio Ferdinand - lots of great stuff about being a player and family life, with occassional olitical remarks, largely clean

@WayneRooney - passionate remarks, occassionally includes something you'd not want kids to read, but worth editing

@JackWilshire - clean remarks about the football world

@RobbieSavage8 - edgy stuff with occassional rewtweets of abuse he's had, so watch it

You can search for more players online, narrowing to players from your favourite team.

With thanks to @DanFreedman99 for advice in putting this list together. Dan writes the Jamie Johnson football books, that are hugely popular with children. If you follow him on Twitter too, you can see a list of several players he recommends if you look back a couple of days on his Twitter feed.

This might be something that won't last forever, so have a go. Many football teams are banning their players from Tweeting. I am a Leeds fan and used to follow seven or eight Leeds players. Now that's gone, because they have been banned. One of our players - Davide Somma - tweeted about his serious injury before the club had released the information, so all the players were stopped.

It's a shame I was enjoying it.