The Life and Times of a Fourth Grade Class at the Dalton School in New York City
You are all off — to camp, to the beach and off on vacation! Hope you are all having a blast!
Next year there will be a new group of Edinger House bloggers and their blog links will be over on the right. But this year’s class — your blogs are still here at the 2006-2007 Student Blogs page.
Here are your wonderful, wonderful projects! I know how hard you worked on them (and also how hard Craig and Ms. Feldman did too!). You should be very proud of them! Ms. Edinger
1 Down the Rabbit Hole (c15ai & c15sf): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download 2 Pool of Tears & 3 A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale (c15fl & c15jg): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download 4 The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill (c15lk & c15of): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download 5 Advice from a Caterpillar (c15bw & c15md): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download 6 Pig and Pepper (c15z b& c15ss): Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadDear Edinger House,
At the very beginning of the year I gave each of you a composition book and a letter from me. In it I explained that we would be writing letters back and forth to each other in that journal and here was your first one from me. You all wrote me back — wonderful letters telling me about your summers, about the sort of learners you are, books you liked, and so on. For the next few months we continued to write back and forth. You wrote about books you were reading. who you thought was the hero of Charlotte’s Web, what you would take with you if you had to emigrate, and more.
In December I decided that instead of you writing me, you should write your classmates. So you did — and then you each read those letters and wrote comments in the journals. And as you did that, it struck me that what you were doing was just like blogging! And with that I decided I wanted you each to have a blog. And so we began.
You did so many posts including:
Whew! We did a lot and it was truly amazing! Your blog replaced those composition books as a place to write about books and learning, it became a place to see what your classmates thought about things and about other kids around the world as well, it became a place to publish stories, and to write so much about so many things. It has been great!
And so for your final post of this year I want you to think through what doing the blog meant to you. What did you learn from doing it? What did you like? What did you not like? What were your favorite parts of doing a blog? Do you want to continue? Why?
Hopefully you will be able to continue these next year, if you want to. Blogs for kids your age are still such a new thing that it depends on how your teachers next year feel about it. Certainly you will still be able to go and look at your blog as much as you want; you just won’t be able to post for the time being.
Thanks for being super bloggers this year!
Ms. Edinger
Bibliography
1. Open House account.
2. Find Pilgrim Bibliography.
3. Drag it to the desktop.
4. “Save as” yournamebibliography.doc
5. Delete books you did NOT use.
6. Save and then add to the end of your story.
7. Put this version of your story in the “ALL DONE (except for copyediting)” folder.
Introduction
Your introduction should give your readers some idea why you wrote the story, what it is about (but not too much!), something about the research you did, and something to get them to want to read the story!
Here are some ideas of what to include:
What ? (e.g. historical fiction)
Why? (e.g. immigration related)
What Other Stuff Might Be of Interest?
genre — journal, story, time travel, etc.
Made-up character — a little about them perhaps? Name?
How did you start learning about this?
Tell something about the research you did (e.g.primary and secondary sources. Mention perhaps Mourt’s Relation)
historical background (Separatists etc.)
Going to Plimoth
Final sentence or two to really get your readers to want to start reading!