Will They Be Good Writers Without You?

It's natural to believe you're doing a great job as a teacher when you're reading students' writing pieces after a writing unit. You've just taught a series of lessons about author's craft and grammar. You can check every box for each writing standard. According to your checklist or rubric, the students' writing meet grade level expectations.

Now, look at the text messages they send to each other, or read the notes they write to each other. That "I" is lowercased again. There are run on sentences everywhere. Even worse, when's the last time you've seen your students write during their free time? This is the realization I had come to a few months ago. I'm not doing my job as a teacher if these writing skills aren't being transfered to their real writing lives.

Plan B

I decided to break out of our classroom bubble and create a more authentic writing space for my fifth graders; one that had a real audience and a real purpose. Using the KidBlog platform, I set up safe blog webpages for my students from a single class account. Each student's blog is monitored by me, but public to the world.

The key to a successful blog is designing it with a specialty. Real blogs specialize in something. Whether it is cooking, traveling, or sports, it has to be about a topic that interests the writer. We spent a couple of days planning and designing our blogs making sure it is a specialty we can write a lot about and stick with for a while.

The Result
My students are practically bargaining with me to get more blogging time each day! While their blogs started off pretty rough around the edges, it started to blossom after daily mini-lessons and conferences. The volume and quality of writing has increased tremendously. One student even told me recently that she woke up in the middle of the night with an idea for her blog and couldn't sleep! We also have started "Author's Corners" that go at the end of each blog. The writer points out specific writing or grammatical strategies they've implemented and bring it to the reader's attention. This is my way of accountability rather than worksheets.

I highly recommend you consider the idea of creating a blogging environment with your students. Authentic audience and personalized writing topics are what has made all of my students fall in love with writing. It's hard to explain the magic until you give it a go. Be patient, use real blogs as examples, and have fun blogging yourself. Believe it or not, some of your most struggling writers may in fact become blogging rockstars!

Share and Comment!
Our blogs have received some attention from a couple of classes in Chicago and Canada. However, my students are writing voraciously in hopes of getting a larger audience. If you can, please check these out, share with your class or colleagues, and drop a comment or two on a post you like. It will make their day! Remember that with students, you need to teach a mini-lesson on what good commenting looks and sounds like before they start commenting on blogs.

Here are a few posts written by my Rockstar Bloggers:

Marisa's Cooking Blog
Maya's Fashion Blog (Incredible blog, scroll through all the blog posts!)
Sophie's DIY Blog
Olivia's Amazing Ballet Blog
Nardos's Reading Blog and another post about a reading strategy she's learned
Briana's Organization Blog
Finley's Sports Blog
Mary Glen's "Books with animals" Blog

All graphics and hyperlinks are designed and learned by students themselves. I have not yet explicitly taught a lesson on this.