Principal Miller introduced student blogging to my class last week.  She began with a video about blogging (Blogs in Plain English).  The class then discussed blogging safety and blogging rules.  A rules page was sent home for the students to discuss with their parents, have signed and return.  Students created paper blogs about their favorite food.  Special attention was given to the blog title and the post title.  Day two with Principal Miller allowed for discussion about comments to a blog post.  We discussed appropriate comments and length of comments.  Students were given post it notes and an opportunity to read a peer's paper blog and make comments.  Paper blogs were passed around the group allowing for several students to comment by writing on the post it note and attaching it to the paper blog.
All this leads to blogging on Kidblog.  This will be the second year for my kids to use Kidblog as their student blogging site.  Our beginning posts will be about things like our favorite foods or what we did on vacation.  Eventually we will use student blogging for reading responses, creative writing, peer editing, and more.   Kidblog allows for me to keep the site closed to outside viewers until I feel comfortable with others viewing.  Then I can open it up to only those with a password and finally to anyone.  Last year my class loved having their family view their posts.  When we opened the comments up to anyone, we had other third grade classes from around the United States read our posts and make comments.  This was super exciting to have kids from Colorado comment about our books with which we were responding.  

So, in the three weeks since my last post I have...stayed up late watching the Olympics (unbelievable what those people can do!), slept in as many morning as possible, prayed for rain, made my new classroom curtains and pillow (I felt like a mini Martha S., but don't look too closely at the stitches), rejoiced for the rain we received, started teacher work days, met parents at meet the teacher night and finally..... started school. We have two days under our belts and are ready to enjoy a much needed weekend.  I've taken a few new pictures of my class to show all the changes since my last post.  I really intended to capture the classroom before all the kiddos returned but  life got in the way and I didn't have time.  So, these pictures are after two days of a little controlled chaos.  Enjoy!

It is always so exciting yet so daunting to step back into the classroom after having the summer off.  On this particular day, I know that I only have about 4 hours to dive in and at least get started.  But, where to start?  My goal was to have the basic set up of the room started and have my teacher area ready for work.  Setting up my desk took about an hour, with most of that time setting up the computer, Smartboard, DVD, etc.  The bulk of the remaining 3 hours was spent deciding where to have my classroom library, cleaning off the shelving and starting to organize the books.  Those three hours flew by.  I spent all day Tuesday and Wednesday at a PLC adaptive school training and learned a lot about group collaboration, group dialogue and discussions.  To do list: sew new curtains, go shopping, (other than a quick stop for Staples cheap back to school weekly sale, I've purchased nothing), new labels for everything, clean carpets, experiment with the on-line plan book, create student agendas, create a few of the amazing things I've found over the summer on Pinterest,  and so much more BEFORE the first day back for teachers, AUGUST 13.

Having a classroom blog isn't a new thing.  21 years ago I used a typewriter to type out my classroom information for parents and then used the mimeograph (did I spell that right?) machine to create a sticky purple master copy.  Then I loaded it into the loud smelly copier. (if you spent too much time with this you would come out of the "teacher's lounge" with quite a buzz and a headache) copier.  This required you to pump the primer to get the purple ink to flow across the drum that attached itself onto each white piece of paper.  Stacking too many pages on top of each other would cause the ink to smear.  If your books or clothes were to make contact with the ink they would be a permanent reminder of important information you were attempting to send home to parents.  Needless to say,this type of parent communication was limited to a beginning of the year "get to know you" letter and usually a "it was great to know you" end of the year letter.
Thank goodness the copy machine allowed teachers to make a class set of copies (unless you had the Nazi Principal that counted the number of copies you made and limited you to 25 per week, no joke! and I had 28 kids in my class).  Hours were spent creating a cute newsletter with clip art (that you actually clipped with scissors from a clip art book that you had to use one of your 25 copies for) and taping the cute little ducks or flowers (not a lot of variety) around the well crafted lines of the parent newsletter.  (many of which were found in the trash or ended up on the floor of the bus for the driver to sweep away.
Newsletters were eventually made on the computer with a few more design options.  Then came the class website and finally the class blog. ( I'm sure I've missed a step or two in there while I was cutting or counting copies.)  This past school year I actually had parents that used the website/blog to get timely information and share events from the classroom with their family across the world.