Blogging Lesson #1 What is a blog?

Today was the first day of our "learning to blog" lessons. (Don't mind my shirt...it was team shirt day and all the teachers wear this shirt!) We started by talking about where the word "blog" comes from. I had to back up and talk about what the "web" is and what a "log" is. We are keeping a list of all of our Blog Words. I am hoping that we will continue to add to this list throughout our lessons.

We used the smartboard and went to look at our classroom blog. I showed them what "comments" were and we read a few. It was interesting to the children to see that even people that do not know us were looking at our blog!

The next step in our lesson today was to look at a post that I started. I posted a picture of the food that we had collected in our classroom for our school food drive. I started with the title.

Me: What would be a good title for our post?

Them: We collected food.

Me: That sound more like the story! What would the title of that story be?

After a while, we got to "Cartons for Caring" as our title.

Then I worked on generating the information that we wanted to put into our post. We had a discussion about why we don't need to list all of the foods that we collected. The picture tells the reader that information! The children were excited and insightful. the last line of our post made me most proud.

Check out our finished post on my classroom blog Mrs. Faas' First Grade!

I was really happy with how this lesson went. It took about 20 minutes or so. I am hoping to add some words to our word list next time (scroll, upload). I think that I would like to spend the next lesson looking at a bunch of pictures (some good and some bad) and talk about what kind of picture makes a good blog picture.

If any of you out there have worked on teaching young ones to blog and have any suggestions for me, let me know!

Stay tuned!

Bee the Change~

FUN!

Hello to all my blog-world friends!

I am so excited!

The first reason that I am excited is that there is SO MUCH fun Bloggy stuff out there that generous, creative people are giving away! It is inspiring me to look in my stuff and see if there is anything worthy to share!

( I must be excited.....look at all those exclamation points!!!!!!!)

The second reason is that I am starting a project tomorrow that I have been planning for a while. I am teaching my first graders to blog. I am so excited! I am doing a gradual build-up starting with a whole group blog post. I also am going to be "double blogging" about this project. I will publish blog posts here that explain the process for doing this with the kids and will also link to my classroom blog Mrs. Faas' First Grade so that you can see our work!

I would LOVE your feedback on this project as we go along. Comments and suggestions are appreciated.

Wish me luck!

Bee the Change~

Imitation is the Highest Form of Flattery

I do not usually post during the day BUT I just had to take a minute while the children are having some inside recess (20 degrees outside with wind chill factor....I don't think so) and I saw 2 of my girls playing school.

One had a notebook and the other had a play camera. When I asked them what they were doing they replied "Playing school". When I asked them what the camera was for, they replied.......

(can you guess?)

"To put our work up on our pretend class BLOG!"

Seriously.

I love them.

Bee the Change~

Tedd Arnold Comes to Visit!

We were so lucky last week to have Tedd Arnold come to visit us at our school! It was a ton of fun!

This free photo slideshow made with Smilebox

Bee the Change~

Glasses ROCK!

I have been a little uninspired lately. Busy and uninspired. But today, this little sweetie came into school with a smile that lit up the room AND her new glasses! This was a huge deal because when she was going to get her eyes checked, she was absolutely, positively, NOT going to wear glasses. Now......I wear glasses so I was bound and determined to convince her that glasses ARE AWESOME! She now thinks so too!

Bee the Change~

Coming to our Senses!

We are working on our TAS (Targeted Academic Support) groups at school. (I would explain it more clearly if I understood it better myself) and I have the group of first graders that has difficulty coming up with ideas for writing. We have talked about how writers write about what is important to them, write about what they see and then we did this fun writing! (Sorry for the lower quality pics...only had my phone!)

In order to demonstrate that writers use their senses to write stories. I pulled the mystery flavors out of a package of Dum Dum suckers and gave one to each of my 12 authors. We worked on our writing webs and wrote about the following:

• what our lollipops looked like with the wrappers on
• what they looked like with their wrappers off
• what they smelled like
• what they tasted like
• what they thought about them

I drew the web on the smartboard to help them remember what to write about.

This is our first sentence!

Yummy!

Joey's didn't last long.

Filling in the web.

It was a ton of fun and the kids did some great writing!

I have 3 more weeks of this! Any other great ideas?

Bee the Change~

Inspiration & Joy (and a little Halloween)

It was one of "those" weeks. You know the kind. The kind where you are thinking "Would you like fries with that?" has a nice ring to it. I think that Halloween on Monday was the reason for most of this. The kids were all kinds of crazy Monday, all kinds of tired Tuesday and out of

sorts the rest of the week. Even I thought that Wednesday was Thursday and kept referring to the next day as Friday. Anyway, I feel like I did not teach anything blog-worthy all week so I decided to post some things around my room that inspire me to keep up the good fight and things that bring me joy. Even though we do not celebrate Halloween in our school, a little bit slipped in......Here's to a better week ahead! Cheers!

My owls from my friend Becky are right next to my desk. they keep me smiling.

One of the kids made this for me and was SO PROUD that I hung it up.

(If anyone has any idea what it is, let me know.)

My co-worker (and dear friend) Michaela gave this to me when she moved to Connecticut 6 years ago. He has been on top of my phone every year since.

It is surprising how long it takes kids to notice he is there. And that he is naked.

This is my ID badge (with the picture conveniently NOT in the picture). My buddy Charlie gave me the leaf to tuck in the pouch. It had been dandelions before the leaf. The little purple crystal is a new addition from Viktoriya. Love these little "treasures".

I love you too Margarite.

SSSHHHH.....Halloween snuck in......

witch's broom pen and spider ring...fun!

even the teacher may have worn some contraband jack-o-lanterns...

Bee the Change~