Daily Archives: February 18, 2015

First Grade Bloggers!: Part 5–Teaching the BIG kids!

Alright….one more time…here are the links to the first four parts of the story.  And this one is probably the biggest and best: this part of the story is about how 20 super smart first grade bloggers taught their FIFTH GRADE BUDDIES about how to blog.  Yup–you heard me right: the little kids taught the BIG KIDS something.  Before I even tell you what happened, I feel like I should start with my some of my kiddos’ words about how it felt.  Wait—maybe that will tell the story better than anything else I could say. 🙂

Evan—“It felt spectacular. I felt good teaching a 5th and I’m only a 1st grader. It was hard. He kept on asking me questions and I wasn’t sure how to answer.”

Peyton—”It made me feel happy. It filled up my bucket to be a good teacher to a 5th grader.”

Lauren—“I felt happy because I got to see my buddy and there were words that were popping up that were funny.” (I think this is about the auto-correct feature on their iPads 🙂 ).

Ella Marie—“It felt awesome. I got to make blogs and I like blogs! I saw something new and I told my buddy about it.”

Sara—“I felt happy because we could make a blog together.”

Charlie—“I felt like I was the most important teacher in the world! I like that my buddies are funny!”

Diego—“I felt so happy because usually big kids but usually little kids were the teachers!” (Doesn’t this one just say it all?!)

Kylie—“I felt good because we got to experience new things that I didn’t know about, then I figured out I did know about it.”

Emily—”It felt good because I felt like a teacher and also it felt good to teach a 5th grader!! Little kids usually get taught by bigger ones.” (Again–what an authentic audience!)

Thomas—“I was really excited because it was my first time writing with a 5th grader. It opened up my grit.”

Amelia—“I felt really happy because I didn’t know how to spell a word, and my LB helped me. It filled up my bucket!”

The assessment we used to tell us we did a SUPER JOB of explaining blogs to our buddies?  Their questions to their teacher as they left our room: “Dr. Grayson, can we have our own blogs, too?”  What more could we ask for??  🙂

First Grade Bloggers!: Part 4–GOING LIVE!

Yep, there were three parts before this one that gave more details of this exciting journey into the blogosphere!  (Part 1  Part 2  Part 3)

After we had done days and days of prerequisite work (including teaching our friends in Rm. 203 about how to comment on blogs and having them join us for a day of practice), we were ready to give it a try (plus, we had to be ready for when we’d teach our 5th grade buddies all we knew about blogging–more on that later!).  Needless to say, the excitement in the room was CRAZY!!

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These pics are from our share session with our neighbors, but they really could show what it looked like as we started our blogs, too.  I mean, I guess there’s no real way to show the process of writing a new blog except maybe to share the blogs with you!  As you read our new Kid Blogs, imagine the big smiles on our faces as we made them!  Being a blogger is SERIOUS BUSINESS when you’re 6!  Check it out! 

First Grade Bloggers!: Part 3

If you haven’t read part 1 and part 2 of our blogging journey yet, you can check them out here and here. 🙂

After we had a chance to try out commenting for ourselves on our friends’ paper blogs, it was time to get down to the REAL business of REAL commenting on REAL blogs with REAL people!  This was one of those places where I added in some extra lessons to the version of Blogging 101 I have done with 5th graders.  I just felt like my little bloggers needed more opportunities to practice before they graduated to their own blogspace.

With many things we are learning and practicing for the first time, turn-and-talk or partner conversations are a good way to work through concepts with a friend.  This allows for each to teach and learn (based on what they know), and also to help ensure that everyone is on the same (or at least a similar) page before we move on to doing things independently.

As we gathered for Writers’ Workshop, I had kiddos sit with their elbow partners and explained that I was going to give them a “blog” to read and that they were then supposed to turn-and-talk with their partner about how they would respond to that “post.”  I made sure to write examples that they could relate to, and encouraged them to remember to include what they had learned about how to leave a good comment:  respond to the writing, say more to give details or reasons, and to ask a question to keep the conversation going.  Together with their partners, everyone had a chance to role-play with at least 5 or 6 of these scenarios:

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I tried to write posts that seemed real and relevant to first graders (like ones that they might read on others’ blogs and that they would eventually write on their own!), as well as ones that had examples of the parts of a blog post that we would talk about soon after this.

As a check-in to assess how kiddos had been doing, and to give those that might need more support some ideas, we went through each “post” and shared out some examples of responses.  Together we “graded” the responses by giving thumbs-up if all of the components were there.  Like I said before, this was a new step to my blogging process, but I’m really pleased with how it went and how excited they were about learning it!

The next day I gave them their first go at trying these newly acquired skills on someone else’s blogs.  Together with their partner (the same one as the previous day), they read blog posts and commented.  This day also add a separated but related lesson of its own: QR codes!  Since I knew that this would be a quick and easy way to get websites and other links to my kiddos, but since I also knew they hadn’t heard of them before, I introduced the concept as the way to get to the blogs we would be visiting.  Yep, a two-birds-one-stone situation. 🙂  They learned how to use the QR reader, how to find the site they were looking for and then also how to manipulate the interface of KidBlog.org itself (which would soon come into play as they saw their own KidBlog site!).

They had a great time and did a great job practicing their new commenting skills.  The downside?  The only links I could find to 1st Grade KidBlogs (at the time) were archived ones from classes that were not able to respond to the comments we left. 😦  Oh well, we got to practice on our end anyway, right?  🙂