Blog About Blogging

When we were first given the assignment of making a blog, I was a little unsure about how it was relevant to the elementary classroom. I was worried about safety and whether or not the benefits of blogging would be worth the risk. Now that I have kept a blog for the past few weeks, I am beginning to see the great benefit of using them in your classroom. Not only does it get students writing and reading for a real and meaningful purpose, but it also is great for reflection. In addition to the great benefits in writing and language arts, blogging also helps students become technologically literate.

Although I saw the great benefits of using blogs/social networking in upper elementary classrooms, I struggled with a way to incorporate it into my kindergarten classroom. I decided that I will use a reflective blog in my classroom, but in a different format than we did in class. Instead of having students keep individual blogs, we would keep a class blog on our class webpage. This would be done every week in a shared writing format. On Thursdays we would reread last weeks blog and read the comments/replies added to it (from parents, grandparents, other teachers, etc). On this day we would also brainstorm a list of activities that we could write about in this weeks blog. On Friday, we would do a shared, reflective writing as a class. Our writing would be put onto the class website for parents to read and respond to. After doing this for the first month or two of school, we may modify the activity into an interactive writing. This would allow students to type parts of the story that they know such as sight words, beginning sounds, and suffixes. This activity would get students familiar with writing for a specific audience and purpose. It would also help them reflect on the week’s activities and apply their knowledge of sight words and letter-sound relationships to real-world writing.