A few years ago, a new student from Mexico joined my 3rd grade class. Lucky for me, she was literate in Spanish, which means she could read and write in Spanish at the 3rd grade level. All we had to do was transfer her knowledge to English. I was thankful that I had experience with a Spanish-only student when I taught Kindergarten, who, by the way, was fluent in both languages at the end of the year. Although I had the experience, my third grade classroom looked much different than my Kindergarten room. I labeled as many objects as I could, but I knew she needed to be with younger students. As luck would have it, her younger brother was in Kindergarten, so I sent her to his classroom during Accelerated Reader time. This experience reminded me that learning a second language is very similar to 1st language development.
If I were to create a blog for my 3rd grade class for literacy development, I might follow in the tracks of Mrs. McCullers. However, I would make sure that my students double-check their posts before they publish. This would have been a great thing for my Spanish-only speaker. Here's a link to a short video that explains why we should let our students blog.
Do you have a similar experience?
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Preliminarily, I can say that it seems students who use blogs to review material perform better on unit exams. (Significance values and actual results are in progess).
ReplyDeleteAll of my experience has been at the secondary level, and out of the few friends I know that teach on the primary level, not many have tried a blog assignment. But those who have reported an increase in writing and an increase in the willingness to write. Many students are viewing blog assignments as a break from traditional classroom work (sort of a treat I guess). One teacher could actually take away the blog assignments as a disciplinary measure. Over the short period of time these assignments have been in place, it is really unclear how much of an improvement the students have made on grammar. However the blog assignment does seem to have overcome the first step, which is to get the students interested and willing to write.
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