4th Grade Blog Posts for MLK Day
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is coming up on Monday, so fourth grade students in Ms. Tonello’s class created blog posts about him using Instablogg. I’ve been using this site a lot lately because it’s easy to use, there’s no login required, and it provides a link to go back and edit the site later. Ms. Tonello’s been teaching them how to add good details to their writing, so we started with an activity using Today’s Meet. Today’s Meet is a great way to have a class discussion and get many students to participate. Plus, it leaves a written transcript that you wouldn’t have with a regular class discussion. I gave them a simple sentence: I feel sick. I told them to write the same sentence in a better way. We discussed their responses and tried to guide them to make better sentences. Then we tried it again with another simple sentence: We took a trip. I encouraged them to give more details like who, where, when, etc. You can see the transcript of our discussion here. Now that they were warmed up, we went to Instablogg and I told them to either write about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or about a dream that they have for making the world a better place. I gave them a quick informal rubric to rate their own writing, and they had about fifteen minutes to write. When they finished, I showed them how to do a Google image search to find a picture and add the link to their post. If a picture is too large, you can easily resize it by typing in a number in the size box. I usually tell students to type “400” in the width box. Finally we published their blog posts and dragged the links to their folders. We also made sure to drag the editing links to their folders as well. Comments are disabled at school, but I encouraged them to read each others’ posts at home and write constructive comments that would help improve their writing (like we learned in our introductory activity). Another way to edit each others’ writing is to use Markup.io which I mentioned in a previous post. You can see a sample that I edited here. If you would like to read some of their posts and even write some comments you can click here.