Blogging excitement!

Today, we talked as a class about our classroom blog - the students all said they really liked having the blog, and gave a lot of good reasons why they thought it was important for our class to have a blog. Some of these reasons were: keeping our families up-to-date on what we're doing in the classroom, letting people in other parts of Canada and other countries know what going to school in Winnipeg looks like; letting former classmates (Hello, Taylor!) know what we're up to, and hearing from them through the comments they leave; etc.

Much excitement followed this discussion, as I informed the class that they were going to be getting their own blogs (we'll be posting more about this in the coming days, and parents of Room 18 students will be getting a letter explaining how this will work as well). There was a lot of cheering - they're pumped! In fact, they wanted to start right then and there! However, we talked about creating criteria that the students need, in order to write good quality posts, and to be safe on the Internet, before they begin writing on their own - here is what they came up with:

1) Use 'juicy' words (aka interesting language)
2) Write about 1 idea/post, and give it a title that matches what you're writing about.
3) Use an uppercase letter at the beginning of a sentence, and at the beginning of the names of people and places.
4) Use punctuation.
5) Use Go/Stop sentences to start and finish each post.
6) Make sure it makes sense.
7) Write about interesting things, and use details and description to tell about it.
8) Write at least 5 sentences.
9) Try your best to spell correctly.
10) Put one space between words and after each sentence.
11) Don't include personal information like your last name, your home address, phone number, or an e-mail address.

I was very impressed with the list they came up with. What was even more impressive was that this list (with almost no prompting) was almost exactly like the list that my friend Mrs. Malksoske and her Grade 1/2 classroom came up with when they started blogging! The students and I are really excited for them to begin their own blogs - stay tuned!