Paper Blogging Time

If your classroom is like mine, writing isn't your students favorite subject.  Writing is a challenge for many students,  and with students abilities all over the place, challenging to teach.  At my school, writing is one of our school improvement goals.  As part of this goal, all of our students are expected to complete some type of weekly writing assignment. Unfortunately,  the quality of work I am receiving isn't meeting my expectations.  So what does a reflective teacher do... change the game plan.  I decided to introduce my students to blogging as an alternative to our weekly writing assignment.  Little did I know blogging would get my students so excited to write.

Before the kids started writing, we had to establish what a blog is: a web-log.  The kids really had no prior experience with concept, so it was nice to know everyone had the same starting point and I was building the foundation I wanted them to have.

During our discussion I asked questions like: What do you know about blogging?  Have you ever read a blog? Why do people blog? Why might a student not feel safe blogging?  Of course, there were a variety of responses to these questions.

Once we had established our starting point,  It was.... Paper Blogging Time!!!  Ms. Grier stumbled across a paper blogging lesson that was a great resource. (http://www.notesfrommcteach.com/2010/09/learning-to-blog-using-paper.html)   We adapted this lesson to meet our classroom needs.

To begin, students were asked to write one to two paragraphs about something they are passionate about.  They could write about anything.  We had ideas from sports to outdoor life and girls scout cookies to annoying habits.  Fifth and sixth graders are creative!  This was their rough draft, for their official paper blog post.  Next, I showed the kids my blog and had them notice some of the features of a blog.  We brainstormed a list of noticings and this was our expectations for the paper blog.

The kids designed their own paper blog, complete with a title, background or border, and list of archived posts.  They worked hard on these paper blogs for about three days during I/E time.  When they were finished, their blogs were amazing!

However, we weren't finished just yet.  As you know, kids (people in general) are good at giving feedback.  For the purpose of blogging, I want specific types of feedback.  So after the blogs were finished, we took one day to look specifically at types of comments people make and expectations for commenting.  We even brainstormed a list of blog sentence starters to help jump start their thinking.  Once we had a game plan, I set the kids loose to read, think, and respond to their classmates.




Commenting is still a work in progress, but the kids couldn't wait to get back to their seats to see what others thought about their posts.  Our next step is to take a closer look at the specific comments students wrote and what we can do to develop our commenting skills.