Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Kids in Charge

We finally did it! It is only the sixty-first day of school but we finally managed to get our routine in shape for the kids to write our class blog posts. I take a lot of pictures throughout our day and week to use in our class blog. So when the kids get the chance to take over I open up the folder of pictures and show them the most recent ones to pick from. The pick one topic (today the choices based on pictures were the book fair, painting in art class, and tumbling in P.E.) and then decide which pictures they want to include. Usually they end up including all of them.

The kids today picked the book fair. They picked all the pictures (each one would have eliminated one or two but the other would want that one so we kept them all). I dump the pictures into a post and the kids decide what they want to write. They dictate to me and I type as they talk. We reread it together, paste it into google translate in order to have it in Spanish as well, and publish the post. Then I show it to them and today we put it up on the projector so the whole class could see it. I'm hoping that will mean lots of kids want to give this a try.

You can't leave comments at the site, sadly, but we'd love to hear your thoughts if you have any about it. Feel free to tweet us @exploreorrs or leave a comment here and I'll share it with the kids.

2 comments:

Miss Angel said...

That is an awesome idea! It looks like they really enjoyed the book fair, and I love the idea of translating it into Spanish. (Where I live we'd have to translate it into Polish, Russian, and about nine different Indian dialects too!) You probably know about this but there is a site called Kidblog.org where teachers can start classroom blogs for the kids and can password protect it (if they want) so parents can leave comments too. :D

goldfish said...

I'm always looking for a way to incorporate student voice into lessons and projects. This looks like a great way to do just that.

I recently finished reading Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. She speaks of the importance of writing with a purpose and writing for an audience. This project seems to provide both for your students. Writing for an audience has the power of elevating the level of the author. Translation is another way the students can increase the audience for their writing.

Thanks for sharing.