Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Writing Blogs- Senior Bloggers

Maria, Jane and Judith teach the year 5 and 6 classes at North East Valley Normal School. They have decided that they would like to focus on their writing programmes. We started a writing blog for each class, the children will word process their stories and then post these onto the writing blog for feedback from their classmates, teachers and other readers of the blog.

We were hoping that if students have an audience for their writing they may take more care when editing and using surface features in their writing correctly. Maria asked for some ideas or resources that she could use to motivate the children's writing as the biggest problem she felt was that with the age group she teaches they are just a bit sick of the routine of writing, what was exciting when they were younger is now old hat.

I have provided a few links to writing websites and ideas to stimulate children's imagination and seeing the purpose of writing to communicate what they have to say.
Story starter
Story Starter machine
Telescopic Text- great way to explain detail and description in writing
WritingFix for teachers lots of ideas but a messy website. The best thing about this site is it provides some book titles which are examples of the type of writing or feature you might want to teach.
Writing Prompts -Most random questions, a fun quick writing task.
Grammar Games
Magnetic Poetry online
Museum Box
Videos can be a great motivation for writing, instructional videos for instructions, see the post on this blog for Michael.

Cheryl the Deputy Principal at North East Valley Normal School takes children from the senior classes for extra support and extension in writing. Rather than work in isolation she prefers to strengthen what is happening in class so the students will benefit in class from her sessions. She will also be working with the students she takes to post on their class writing blogs.

We discussed word processing skills that the students might need to do this effectively and support their participation on writing blog. The teachers will provide time for students who are very slow typers to improve their typing through the online games linked to the Otepoti website. Cheryl used dancemat typing and was happy with the visual information provided by the online game. The blog allows visitors to post a comment. So that the teacher can monitor comments and knows which students have left which comments, they will have to teach their students to follow the instruction here to do this.
-Cheryl will get the extension group to focus on improving their comments made to their classmates on the blog. She will do this by developing a rubric with the children to evaluate work against which we hope will enhance feedback and the quality of the work.

One website which has a rubric generator on it that I have used is Rubistar I wouldn't recommend using the rubrics on there as they are mostly based on American school systems but it is a good quick way of getting some examples for children to look at to understand how a rubric works. You get so many results usually and have to scroll right down the page to see the rubric options and it is hard to filter un-useful results out but better than inventing your own examples. The power of a good rubric is that the children have helped to create it so in doing this they come to understand what the criteria really means.

I'm looking forward to seeing if the blog can help motivate some great writing.

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