I have been teaching essay writing to students in grades 3-5 for the past couple of years now. I have studied various approaches to teaching this genre - from Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project to Ruth and Stacey at twowritingteachers.com, my favorite education bloggers. Teaching essays, "idea based writing", to elementary school students, has confirmed what I always believed to be true - children are profound thinkers who have a diverse, creative, unique, and innocent take on the world. Through teaching the essay genre, I learned that when given a forum and structure for writing about their ideas (as opposed to their stories, narrative writing), students have have been able to produce thought provoking writing pieces. As I pondered long and hard about how best to teach students to write blog posts, the words "thought provoking" and "idea based writing" came to mind. I realized that good blog posts really are "mini" essays. My goal for this blogging study is far beyond just an exposure to 21st Century Technology and a way for me to explore my own passion for digital literacy (although those goals do deserve some merit). It is more student driven than that- what I want is to give students a forum, a blog, in which to write their profound thoughts for a broad and authentic audience and I want to give them a writing structure and genre for them to write well about those thoughts. Profound thoughts, after all, deserve to be shared and read by many. So, this week I married my traditional essay writing instruction with this blog study. I gave students the same structure for writing a blog post as I had in the past for writing an essay. I am happy with the work they did in their writing notebooks this week, drafting T-charts of Thoughts and Ideas, Noticings and Wonderings and using the "boxes and bullets" structure for organizing their future blog posts. Next week my writers will become bloggers. Stay tuned for their first "essay" blog posts!
1/27/11
I have high hopes for where I think this unit will go but I am nervous. Every step must be carefully thought out, every move we make as teachers must be deliberate and must lead out students to what both teachers truly want to see as an outcome - good, quality, standards-based writing. I feel strongly that we as teachers who teach "digital natives" must be considerate of the world in which our students live in and have foresight into the world which they will inhabit. I believe today's teachers need to be pioneers but how nerve wracking- we are pioneering an ever-changing digital world that did not exist 10, even 5 years ago. So as we carefully plan each lesson, Mrs. Pintarelli and I exchange calculated glances since we are ultimately testing whether or not this experiment will prove our theory: teaching to and in a medium familiar to these digital natives and in a context that they will need as citizens of the 21st century will ultimately produce quality and standards based writing because we will be meeting them in a place they are comfortable and familiar with - the digital world. So far, we have immersed our students in the genre of blogging, now we turn to the hard part:
1. teaching them the writing skills and strategies they need to write quality blog posts
3. teaching them to write in ways that will inspire readers and ignite conversation
1/14/11
Last night, I attended a parent night at my daughter's preschool. The presenter, a social worker and child life specialist, was speaking on the subject of play. She was talking about encouraging our children to play with toys that are limitless. She spoke about how a toy with lots of noises, bells and whistles and lights will probably not be as appealing to a child as the box it came in. The reason, she said, was that the toy has limits. There are a finite amount of ways a child can play with that toy but an empty box is limitless.
I found myself thinking of our blog unit while she was talking. A piece of paper is limited. There are a set amount of words you can write on it and then it is finished. Sure, you can staple a page on it, but even then, once a piece of writing is written and completed it is over but a blog is truly limitless. If limitedness is what inspires children when they play with toys then maybe limitedness is what will inspire children when they write.
1/11/11
I find it so interesting that the students seem to think blogging is exciting because they feel such ownership over it. With what little they know about blogs, they view it as something that totally belongs to them. When that comment was made in class, 20 other heads were nodding in agreement. As writing teachers, we give our students so much choice in writing workshop that I was surprised to find out they don't see their traditional writing as totally "their own". Mrs. Pintarelli commented that she thinks because a blog post really exists out there in the digital world, they know anyone can see what they wrote. That broad and authentic audience is what is giving students that sense of ownership over a blog. We as teachers of this unit are now charged with a big task. How do we keep their feelings of ownership and authenticity while still teaching them the form of blog creation, posting and commenting?
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