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

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.

Crew News October 1, 2012

Blogging

We are blogging! Each student in our crew now has their own blog. They are all very excited about this so I am sure that you have heard all about it by now. Many of them are even blogging from home. I love this because it shows just how excited they are about it. All of their posts and comments on their posts are moderated by me. This means that nothing gets published to the internet without my approval. We would love to have some comments from you all. Please feel free to visit our blog site and comment on any blog - not just your child's blog. Remember, all comments are moderated by me so your comment won't show up until I approve it. This just keeps advertisements and junk messages off of our site. Feel free to share the link to our blogs with grandparents and other family members and friends. Ms. Noreene has been reading and commenting on our blogs, too. Be sure to notice that there are a couple of pages of posts so far. We have so much to say! Below are a few facts about our new blogging experience that I thought you might be interested in:


• My purposes for introducing blogging were to: increase the motivation to write, provide the students with an authentic audience for their writing, allow for conversations about and feedback on their writing through comments, make connections with others, have a place to share their thoughts and ideas and learn some basic computer literacy skills. I believe we are meeting these purposes and more.
• I purposely taught the students just the basic things that they would need to know in order to navigate around in Kidblogs and to create a new post. I hope that they will begin to explore and learn on their own and then teach each other. We will also have brief sessions on new features that they can try on their blogs as time goes on.
• There are still many more things I would like to do with our blogs but I am going to let the process evolve naturally so I am not sure how many of these we will accomplish. Things I would like to do include:  have students take pictures at school to add to their blogs, connect with another first grade class from another part of the country or world that blogs and read each others’ blogs and comment (I know of several classes we could eventually connect with), learn to embed video, create posts with a specific content related purpose, do more peer editing before we publish and so on.

Feel free to drop by our crew blogs and learn more about us and add a comment or two. You can get to our blogs on the Resources page of this blog. Click on Kidblogs once you are there. You can also find a link to our blogs on the right sidebar of this blog or you can go directly to this link:


http://kidblog.org/MsJillsCrew12-13/


Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 3.1 Patterns

Boot Camp is this Friday. Our crew will be at Boot Camp from 9:15 am to 11:15 am. All students will need to bring a lunch from home on Friday. There will be no school lunches that day. Your child can continue to bring in non-perishable food items and collect pledges all week.

No school on October 22nd. This will be a teacher work day.

Crew News January 23, 2012

Kidblogs

Our crew is still blogging. We have been experimenting with some of the features of Kidblogs like bold type, italic type, font size, font color and spell check. If you haven't been to our crew blog page for a while, you might want to check it out. There are new posts about a coyote, a new cousin, a trip to California and more. You can find posts by going to our crew page and reading those that are recent. If you would like to see older posts then you can change the number of posts visible at the top of the screen or you can click on an individual student's name to see their collection of posts. You can find the link to the our crew blog page by clicking on the colored words in this post or by going directly to our blog and clicking on the link on the right hand side of the page. While you are on the crew blog, you might also want to check out the links to Ms. Pam's and Ms. Cheryl's blogs. All of the bloggers (our crew, Ms. Pam and Ms. Cheryl) would love to have you visit and perhaps even leave them a comment. You can also share the link to the blogs with grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, etc. and they can leave comments, too. Remember that comments won't appear immediately though because they all must be approved by me first. It is very exciting to the crew to receive comments on their posts. They love to know that someone is reading what they write.

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 5.13 More "What's My Rule?'

Crew News November 14, 2011

Blogging
We are blogging! Each student in our crew now has their own blog. They are all very excited about this so I am sure that you have heard all about it by now. Many of them are even blogging from home. I love this because it shows just how excited they are about it. All of their posts and comments on their posts are moderated by me. This means that nothing gets published to the internet without my approval. We would love to have some comments from you all. Please feel free to visit our blog site and comment on any blog - not just your child's blog. Remember, all comments are moderated by me so your comment won't show up until I approve it. This just keeps advertisements and junk messages off of our site. Below are a few facts about our new blogging experience that I thought you might be interested in:


• My purposes for introducing blogging were to: increase the motivation to write, provide the students with an authentic audience for their writing, allow for conversations about and feedback on their writing through comments, make connections with others, have a place to share their thoughts and ideas and learn some basic computer literacy skills. I believe we are meeting these purposes and more.
• I purposely taught the students just the basic things that they would need to know in order to navigate around in Kidblogs and to create a new post. I hope that they will begin to explore and learn on their own and then teach each other. We will also have brief sessions on new features that they can try on their blogs as time goes on.

• There are still many more things I would like to do with our blogs but I am going to let the process evolve naturally so I am not sure how many of these we will accomplish. Things I would like to do include: learn to add comments, have students take pictures at school to add to their blogs (I am looking for a site to host our pictures that is not blocked at school because we don't have much storage space on our Kidblogs site), connect with another first grade class from another part of the country or world that blogs and read each others’ blogs and comment (I know of several classes we could eventually connect with), learn to embed video (still working on a host site), create posts with a specific content related purpose, do more peer editing before we publish and so on.

Feel free to drop by our crew blogs and learn more about us and add a comment or two. You can get to our blogs on the Resources page of this blog. Click on Kidblogs once you are there. Or you can go directly to this link:

http://kidblog.org/MsJillsCrew11-12/

The Book Fair is Here!

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 4.1 Reading Thermometers

Crew News August 19, 2011

Blogging
We are working toward the day when each student in the crew will have their own blog. This usually happens round November or December. In order to understand what a blog is and how you use one, we read our crew blog occasionally and today we wrote our first post together as a crew. We will continue to write posts together about once a week until it is time for each child to have their own blog. Then they will know the types of things you can do with a blog. It is always so exciting when that day comes. The story below about the game Top-It was written by the crew with me doing the typing. I projected the words up on the screen at the front of the room. We talked and wrote and rewrote until we were all happy.


Top-It
We have been playing a game called Top-It in math. It is a card game and whoever gets the highest number wins. If you get a wild card you get to choose your number. When you are done you start over. Whoever gets the most cards wins. We like this game.
-by Ms. Jill’s Crew
(Pictures are below.)

Homework
No homework over the weekend. Enjoy some good books with your child.

IA
Our IA next week will be Art.

New Home

This is the new home of Ms. Jill's Crew. We were previously located at Edublogs from July 2007 until June 2011.