From my blog to yours.....Have a Merry!
Bee the Change~
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Needed a smile
This just made me smile.....no, it was not Pippi Longstocking Day in our room.
Bee the Change~
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Blog Lesson #3 Small groups begin!
There has been quite a bit of excitement in our room this week! We are finally blogging!
Mrs. Muir came in this week and worked with each table group to create a blog post. The first step that we took was to create a list of topics that we could blog about. I discussed "audience" with the kids and told them that there were many people that would read our blog and MOST of them will never be IN our room. We wanted to share some of the things that we do each day.
Below is the lis that we generated.
Since we made it, we have actually continued to add to it!As Mrs. Muir (Linda) worked with each group, she guided the discussion around the chosen topic. The children tended to want to stray from the original topic. When they were writing about birthdays in our room, they wanted to talk about their own birthday parties!
Focus, focus,focus.
As Linda was guiding the discussion around the topic, SHE was the one that was doing the writing. Later in the blogging process, we hope that the children will be taking over the writing process.
The next step was to have the children learn how to use the digital camera and take pictures relating to their blog post. Linda was able to focus on holding the camera button down and waiting, holding the camera still and being close enough to get the best picture. Some of these children had never taken a picture before! What a great experience!
At this point, I am the one that is typing and uploading pictures for the post. I wanted the children to see a quicker result to keep the excitement level up!
I am not sure where to go from here. I feel like the kids are not quite independent enough to take over the writing. Maybe just keep up with small group blogging and continue to develop our list? HELP bloggy friends!
Follow these links to see the posts done by the children!
Monday, December 5, 2011
Blogging Lesson #2 Picking the best photo!
Our Lesson today was focused on what makes a good blog picture. We started by reviewing our Blog Words chart and adding the word "scroll". I was really impressed by how many kids already knew that term.
I then demonstrated the fine art of scrolling.
Then Colin showed us his scrolling technique!
While we were scrolling, Alex noticed that we had some comments on our post from last week so we used another word from the blog word list and clicked the comment LINK!
Onto our lesson of the day! The focus was to determine what makes a good photograph for a blog. We then looked at the following pair of pictures and talked about which one would be a better picture.
The kids thought that this was easy! The first one was blurry and did not show the whole door. The second photo showed the stocking, the gel clings and (of course) our Hello! The second pair was a little more difficult to decide on. They liked that the picture showed our whole cubby area but one little smartie said "but you can't see what the decorations ARE!" this led to a discussion about WHO looks at our blog. We know what our room looks like so we know what the decorations are. They are getting very smart about blogging!
The text of the post was added.......
And Joseph saved and published! Go to our classroom blog, Mrs. Faas' First Grade! to see our finished post.
Where to next? I think that we are going to move into small group blogging next. I am going to have small groups of 5-6 pick a topic, learn to use the digital camera and make their own post about something at our school. I am thinking about putting up a piece of chart paper so that we can keep track of our great ideas!
What do you think?
Friday, December 2, 2011
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!
Thursday, December 1, 2011
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!
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