Paper Blogging & Kidblog With Our 2nd Graders!

We are very excited to bring Kidblog to Van Meter Community School this year.

Over the last month, we have had 187 students in 7 classes from 2nd to 8th grade sign up within their classes with their very own KidBlog. 

Kidblog is a blog platform created for students.  It gives us, as teachers and students, a safe student publishing.  

Teachers in over 70 countries trust Kidblog to share students writing with a real audience, as the Kidblog homepage states. 

It has been wonderful seeing posts by our students being added every day.  

As we kick off blogging, we have also talked a lot about writing posts and commenting on posts.  In fact, in Staci Braun's classroom we did a fun paper blogging activity with her students last week. 

For this activity, Staci had the students write about a science activity they did with pumpkins on this Building a Paragraph sheet.

When they finished, we talked about commenting and what good comments could say and look like.  We did a little practicing.

Then we put sticky notes on each group of desks.

 The students would write a comment on a sticky note when they received someone else's blog post.

They took the job of reading their classmates post and making thoughtful comments very seriously.

 Some of the comments were even....

 ...tiny drawings too.

 We had the students exchange posts....

 ...four times.

This gave them a good sense of what reading posts and writing comments felt like as they saw what others wrote too. 

When four comments were made, the posts were given back to the author so they could read the comments and even make responses themselves.

The paper blogging exercise really helps them with the idea of writing posts and making comments. 

These 2nd graders are now super ready to write their first posts and make comments within Kidblog..  

We are excited for this first step. We can't wait for them to connect with other classes at Van Meter who are using Kidblog and to start making global connections within Kidblog around the world. 

You can find out more about Kidblog here.