Kidblogs as Portfolios

We use our Kidblogs as our portfolios in first grade. At times I have all of the students upload a specific piece of work. For example all students uploaded a ShowMe of their All About book as a piece of evidence of where they are in writing. Other times students choose what they would like to upload. Currently I have asked every student to do a reading ShowMe with photos of pages from a book that they can read and a recording of them reading those pages. Keep checking the blogs as more of those will appear in days to come.

There are a few things you should know about how blogs work in order to view your child's blog as a portfolio:

1. The most recent posts are always at the top of a page when you visit a blog. Older posts will be further down the page. Many blogs have many pages so you might need to click on the page numbers at the bottom of the page to navigate to other posts.
2. I have "tagged" all of the posts the crew has made as I have approved them for publication. This makes it easy to view all of your child's math posts or writing posts at one time to see the growth that has happened throughout the year. You simply click on the subject that you would like to view in the tag box. (Photos below.)
3. The size of the words in the tag box indicated the number of posts in that category. The large the print, the more posts in that category.
4. On the main page of our crew Kidblog site, you will also see a tag box on the right-hand side of the page. Clicking on a subject in this box will allow you to see posts by all crew members in that subject area.

Some students have many more posts than others and that is just fine. All students have some posts and they all have the "required" posts. It is fun to scroll back through the posts to see just how much your child has changed this year.

I will also be sending home a file of paper work samples from throughout the year in a couple of weeks that you will enjoy flipping through, too.

Click on the picture to visit our Kidblog page.

The tag box on the main page of our crew blog.

The tag box on Brianna's blog

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 10.2 Telling Time

Commenting on Blogs

While our crew is very good at adding posts to our blogs frequently, we have not been as good about commenting on each other's posts and answering questions about our own posts. I wondered if that might be because we didn't remember how to do this so today we took some time to review how to do this and to actually make comments on each other's posts. Commenting on blog posts is important because:

• comments let blog writers know that they have an audience which is a powerful motivator to write and to make sure the writing is clear
• comments begin conversations between writers about ideas that they share or wonder about
• it is a great way to improve communication skills
• it is fun to read and write comments

Be sure to stop by our Kidblog page and leave some comments for the crew, too.  They will appreciate knowing that they have an audience out there. Remember that I will have to approve all comments before they will appear so don't worry if you don't see your comment immediately. This keeps away all of the spam/advertising type comments that can sometimes appear on blogs.

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 6.9 More Counting Coins

Kidblog

Last Thursday, some of us took some time to write blog posts on our Kidblog page. Below are a few samples but I would recommend that you visit our Kidblog page to see these posts and more including some new ShowMes. Click on the pictures below to see larger versions. Here is the link to our Kidblog page:
http://kidblog.org/MsJillsCrew14-15/

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 5.14 Unit 6 Family Letter

Library
We have library tomorrow. Please help your child remember to return his or her books. They don't like to be "lookers" who can only look but not check out.