The first graders are learning how to blog in order to share what they're learning about family traditions. Each classroom family designates an adult to visit the class to teach us about one of their traditions. With every visit I teach strategies to support deeper listening, comprehension, interviewing, and note-taking. Here's what one of our "family interviews" looks like:
The budding sociologists share their notes with a partner after the family interview in order to better synthesize what they've just learned. They then start writing in sentence form the exact ideas they'd like to upload as comments to the blog. The child whose family was that day's focus writes a blog post, inviting their classmates to comment. Here's one of those posts:
Then the writers type their drafts into the blog post's comment section where all classmates and their families can read and comment them. The plan is that this blog becomes a place where families learn about and converse with each other in order to build deeper interpersonal connections. Here's one first grader consulting his interview notes and paper draft as he writes his blog comment.
