Grade 4 Blogging Unit: Collecting Ideas for 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 1, 2011

Collecting Ideas for Blog Posts

Our student bloggers began to collect ideas for future blog posts.
Day 1: We talked about and teachers modeled one strategy for collecting ideas:

To use this strategy, Mrs. Danahy showed students how to make a T-Chart. She modeled how she looked around her world and wrote down what she noticed. Then, she considered that noticing and wrote down what it made her think - what idea she had about that noticing.

Students then worked on creating their own T charts in their writing notebooks by looking at their world around them and writing down "noticings" and thoughts.