Meeting the Challenge

Every school year I make a vow to blog on a more regular basis.  I usually start out the year well, but before long I am posting less than once a month.  That's why I was excited when I saw the "20 Day Blogging Challenge" on Kelly Hines' blog, In The Trenches.  Even if it takes me two months to accomplish, I will be way ahead of where I am now.  So here I am on New Year's Day, hanging out at Caribou Coffee, writing my first post.

Day One:  Tell about a favorite book to share or teach.  Provide at least one example of an extension or cross curricular lesson.

We start back to school tomorrow.  Right before winter vacation we finished reading The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Spear.  This is definitely one of my favorite books.  Tomorrow we will begin reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.  I love these books, but I only do the first one with the class.  When I choose a book for read aloud, I usually look for books that are part of a series or by a great writer.  When I am sharing a book with the class, students look for additional copies and other books by the author in our classroom or school library.  It is one of the best ways to hook a child into wanting to read.

Key for me is great character development, and a well crafted plot.  The Harry Potter books definitely have this going for it.  The first time I ever read this to a class, I remember that when I would reach for the book, students would hush each other with "Sssshhh!  She's going to read."  I had one little guy in my class who asked his grandma to buy him the second book in the series,  "The Chamber of Secrets".  I know this boy had never asked for a book in his life, but he loved these books.  All year he kept that book on the corner of his desk, pulling it out to read when he had time.  The Harry Potter books are magic!  What teacher wouldn't like that?

One problem I do have when I read the Harry Potter books is that I often have a student who is not allowed to hear them, due to religious reasons.  When that happens I just pull out one of my other books on tape for them to listen to in the hall.

I like to focus on the character development.  It is a great opportunity to discuss character traits and how we can identify those traits by the the things the character does and says.  Sometimes I have students take notes as we go.  Here is a document I may use.  Feel free to use it if you wish.

I love the way J. K. Rowling uses language.  Character names reveal a lot about them.  I always like to do a lesson about how the author names some of the characters and the text books that the students use. We talk about meaningful parts of words.   A perfect example is the villain Voldemort.  My high school French helped me to identify that "mort" means death.  I point out words in English like mortuary and mortgage.  We used the dictionary to look up vol and found volition which can mean power.  Voldemort = power of death.  Is that how Rowling came up with the name?  I don't know, but I find it very interesting.

l have these books on tape.  I love hearing them read by this wonderful actor and reader.  If you have never read the Harry Potter books, give them a try.  The movies do not do it justice. 

Creating an Avatar

The students in my class each have their own blog on our class Kidblog account.  Some of them have been very excited about this and have posted several times this year, but others have been slow to get on board.  Sometimes it is difficult to devote the necessary time to building our writing skills through blogging.  During the two weeks before winter vacation, I reminded my students that ideally blogging should be a conversation.  We took some of our writer's workshop time to read each other's blogs and write comments.

To make their blogs more individual, I had each person create an avatar using either Doppel Me or Build Your Wild Self.  I had not done this with a class before.  In the past we just used the avatars that were available through Kidblog.

The kids LOVED this.  I gave them the option choosing which avatar maker to use.  This lesson also provided a great opportunity to teach the class how to upload a photo to their blog, as well as upload an avatar. 

I found Build Your Wild Self avatars easier to download as jpgs, but both websites worked.  Some of our avatars are pictured above. 

Kidblog Changes

All of my students have their own blogs on Kidblog.org.  After writing and commenting on our paper blogs, we are now working on writing our very first on-line posts.  There have been some big changes to Kidblog this year!  Depending on the settings the teacher chooses, kids can now select an Avatar to display with their comments and in the directory.  They can also choose a background for their blog.

This makes Kidblog much more visually pleasing, and gives the kids an opportunity to have their blog be more individual.  We are going to give this a try.  I think it will make the whole blogging experience much more appealing.

Once we have made these blog design choices, I want my kids to leave them alone and focus on the writing.  Does anyone out there have experience with these new features?  Can you turn off the choices once they have set their avatar and design?  

Paper Blogs

During the last two weeks my students have been taking lots of tests.  Fortunately we have also managed to get some writing in.  We are trying to get our blogs up and running.  I use Kidblog with my students, so they will soon have their very own blogs.  Before they are ready to go on-line, however, we do our first blog post on paper.  

We have been working on personal narratives using our Being a Writer curriculum, so that was a great place to start with blogging.  After my students wrote their personal narrative, they mounted it on card stock.  We talked about how blogs use design to add interest and information to their writing, and to make people want to come back to their blog.  

After we have our first blog post ready, I hang them around the perimeter of our classroom.  Armed with sticky notes, students walk our gallery of blog posts, reading and commenting.  Before we get started, however, we learn how to write good comments.  To do that, I share a blog post and video made by Mrs. Yollis and her students in California.  Here is a link to that post.  

Students read blog posts, and leave their sticky note comments along the edges.  After about 30 minutes, we took a break and let students go back to their own blogs to read the comments.  Some wrote responses to the comments, before we moved back to reading and commenting on other blogs.

This is a really fun activity that clearly illustrates the interactive conversation that a good blog post can generate.  Let's face it, every writer wants someone to read and respond to their work.  I always learn more about the kids with this activity, and I love watching the excitement grow as they receive comments and feedback from the rest of the class.

The original idea for Paper Blogging comes from middle school teacher, Karen McMillan.  You can read more about it on her blog, Notes from McTeach.

We have Parent/Teacher Conferences coming up. I plan to hang our paper blogs in the hall, so parents can read and comment on our posts.  By that time we should have our first real blog posts published on-line.  I hope we can get more parents commenting on our Kidblogs this year.