Posting Series: Reflections on That Workshop Book #5- More Mentor Blogs

A few posts ago, I shared that I have introduced my kids to the world of blogging.  For this journey, I had found kid blogs that I shared with my students to help develop some understanding into how blogs work and how they focus on a topic.

Now further into our blogging journey and reflecting on the importance of using mentor texts and real- world models, I thought I would share some mentor posts that I have been and will be using for our unit.

 1.    Early this week, we used a student blog authored by a fourth grader called the Science Mouse to help us look at how bloggers introduce themselves to their reader.  We looked closely at her first post.  The kids were awesome at noticing what she did in her first post. I used the projector to pop it up on the screen so we could read and reread it together.  They noticed she welcomed readers, talked about herself, what she will write about and then ended her post.  We decided to use this format for our first post. After the students had a rough practice in their notebooks, I introduced them to a checklist and edit form to help them do some second grade rereading and fixing. Then, they were ready (and excited) to post!!!   


2.  By the end of the week, lots of writers were ready to begin thinking about how they could take their blog topic and begin writing about it in different ways.  I found Super Sarah's blog and discovered her acrostic poem post (Sarah had written about Father's Day) to show my students. Many of them were excited to think about writing an acrostic using their topic.     


3. Posting from your topic's point of view. One of my students thought about pretending she was a dog and writing from a dog's perspective.  There are many books that I could use as mentor texts like Dogs by Emily Gravett or Button Up by Alice Schertle.  I found a blog called My Humans written by a boy who writes entirely from the perspective of his dog, Luigi.  This post called Human Games and Exercise teaches the reader about different types of exercise humans need.    


4. Most of my students are excited to learn how to attach a picture to their post. Next week, I would like to show them how.  I found a screencast demo at  A Geekymomma's blog on how to correctly google search and image.   I think it taught me a ton about proper searching and posting images ( I used the proper etiquette for posting this image) !!