I was thinking of ways that I could utilize my blog in my Kindergarten classroom. If I taught older kids, this would be an easy task. With five-year-olds, however, the blogging world isn't exactly accessible and easy to understand.
One thing that immediately came to mind is using the blog to get parents more involved. I could incorporate my blog into homework for my students one night per week. Let's say Thursday is the chosen night. Every Thursday, instead of sending home a worksheet for my students to complete, I instead send home a note instructing the students — with parental help — to visit my blog for their assignment. Each week, the blog will contain a link to a new Website that is both fun and educational. For example, I would provide a link to sites such as www.starfall.com or www.compasslearning.com.
The students would be instructed to visit the link and play at least one of the games or read one of the stories. For example, one week in November I would have them visit www.starfall.com and play the "Turkey" game. I would also ask them a question in my blog, such as: "Which hat did you select for the turkey to wear?" When the students complete the game, they could return to my blog and their parents could help them answer the question in the comment box. It might be fun for the kids to have their parents look through the comments and tell them which hats their friends placed on the turkey.
This homework would not take much time, plus it would be interactive and fun. The idea here is for the students to learn something — in this case, how to spell turkey — without knowing they're being "taught."
The next day in class, I could reinforce what they learned in the game by talking about turkeys and Thanksgiving. We would work on spelling the word, counting the number of syllables in the word, etc.
Carri,
ReplyDeleteI could imagine in Kindergarten it could be quite a challenge to think how to incorporate a blog. Some of the children can barely write their names let alone type a story. I think your idea of using a blog for parental involvement is a great strategy to incorporate technology into your classroom. The younger the children are the more involved they are so I'm sure the parents would enjoy participating in your blog. The only challenge I could think of with that is if a family does not have a home computer. However, if that was the case you could continue to send a paper newsletter home to that family.
A suggestion I have is you could use a blog is to post anything noteworthy the children do during the day. For example, if "Joey" shares a great idea during reading you could post what he said on the blog. Parents love hearing about their child so you could post little clips of the day for the parents to enjoy. Parents could even write comments.
I think your ideas are great! Good luck with your blog!
Lyndsay
Carri,
ReplyDeleteI like your idea for incorporating a blog into your kindergarten classroom. I can imagine it would be difficult to have students type out comments on the blog because of their young age, however, I think having the parents involved is a wonderful idea! Many parents want to get involved in their student’s education as much as possible. This blog homework would give parents a chance to spend quality time with their children, while truly listening to their student due to the fact of writing their response on the blog.
I agree with Lyndsay that it may be difficult to expect all children to have access to the internet, but I believe that many families in this day and age have personal computers at home. There are numerous teachers in my school that send home a weekly newsletter by posting it on their website. This requires parents to access the class website weekly to find out what is going on in school. Every once in a while a parent will request a paper copy of the newsletter. Overall, I think your blog homework assignment that involves the teacher is a great idea.
Keep us posted and let us know how it goes when you implement this into your classroom!