Dear 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:
- one summarizing your oral history book
- reviews of books (including the one you did on amazon.com)
- review of the MS play, “Half a Sixpence”
- a joint post with your third grade buddy about their New Orleans project
- a response to my (as yet unpublished) story about Margru and the Amistad
- your wonderful Amistad poems (and collages) after working with Natasha Trethaway
- some posts about other kids’ blogs (from all over the world)
- your Cinderella story
- posts on what you expected of Plimoth Plantation and what it ended up being like
- an article about our study of forced immigration
- your Mourt’s Relation drawing
- a post on whether the MGM movie of The Wizard of Oz was a good adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s book
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