Grade 4 Blogging Unit: Planning for and Drafting Blog Posts

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Welcome Visitors! This blog shows a Grade 4 Blogging Unit of Study. It was created to serve as a teaching tool for our students as well as a way for two teacher-researchers to record this very new kind of Writing Unit. The creators of this blog, two NJ teachers (one classroom teacher and one Literacy Coach), believe very strongly in teaching students about all genres of writing and believe that digital writing has a place in elementary school classrooms. We are teaching fourth graders how to read and write blogs because we think it will be a genre that they can use to write about what they are passionate about in the world. We welcome any comments and feedback on our lessons and also hope that we will soon have some very well written and thoughtful student blogs to share. Furthermore, as one of the outcomes of this unit, we hope our students will see themselves as writers who are able to produce writing that they feel proud of to put out there in the digital world for all to read and comment on.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Planning for and Drafting Blog Posts

We decided we need to give students a way to organize their thoughts for blog posts before they actually begin to post. We also wanted a way to control what was being posted and so these concerns led us to developing a Blog Post Organizer.

This organizer was adapted from an essay lesson I saw on two writing teachers and I revised it to suit our needs as bloggers

Today students used blog post organizers to draft what will be their first blog posts. They looked over their idea lists they generated last week and began filling out these sheets to "grow their ideas". Then students drafted a blog post in their notebooks. I can't wait for these drafts to become blog posts! We are getting closer to the actual posting day.