This week was a very exciting week for several reasons, but one of the great things our fifth graders experiences was our introduction to blogging. Next week our student created blogs will go live, but I'm getting a little ahead of myself. On Wednesday, we started talking about blogs in general and what our students knew about blogging. We identified the idea that people write blogs because they are passionate about something and want to share it with an audience that is likely passionate about similar things. We also identified a few real world blogs as examples and watched a short informational animation from Common Craft explaining blogs. We then identified our own passions and began our own writing about our passions.
On Thursday, we examined the design of blogs and noticed that it often highlihgted the topic and title, with different elements to draw the reader's attention, such as images, videos, biographies, and more. However, we made a big deal out of remembering that the writing is what is most important. We then spent time adding our writing to a poster to design our paper blogs to connect to our passions.
Friday was the big day! We talked about commenting on work, telling a story to initiate a response from the audience, and what good quality commenting was all about. We then spent time moving around the room reading and commenting on each others' paper blogs. Students were quietly moving through the room reading and writing without any prompting from me! A teacher's dream! It was an amazing day and we are fired up to start our real blogs next week. Stay tuned for more ways to connect with our learning!