The Write Weblog

A Celebration of Comments

The T.A.G. Blogging Machine

The eagles are soaring today!!!

I love this, students! You are something else! Have I told you lately how proud I am of you!  Enjoy the show!

Download BloomingBloggersShow.ppt

No Goodbyes

Wow! The final project is going to be great! I enjoyed watching all of you work on it today. I will try my best to get it all together and published soon. Your readers are going to be in for a real treat!

Now, I refuse to say goodbye because I know I will see you again. If I don't see you, I'm sure I will be reading something you're writing. If may be on blogs, newspapers, magazines, books, or other places. Every year I get the most incredible group of students and you continue to amaze me. It is such a joy to work with you. I don't like it when the year ends (sniff, sniff...) but my spirits rise when I think of all you will accomplish as you continue through your learning journey at school and elsewhere. You're the best!

Awesome bloggers in our midst!

You are an awesome group! What a year we have had! It was so cool watching all of you put your ideas together for our end-of-the-year project. The room was humming! Then the illustrations were so delightful! The final product will be a treat to see!  The best part is that you will be helping other school bloggers.

Another thing I wanted to share with you is how many of you exhibit those great character traits that your principal has been blogging about all year. Like fairness, consideration, compassion, courage, self-respect, respect for others, initiative and that's just naming a few.

I have to get back to your submissions from today and start putting it all together for next week.

One last item, as I walked into school this morning I saw some awesome pictures about the top stories of 2004-2005. Many of you were in those write-ups so I thought I'd post a few here for others to see.

Alejandra has this artwork selected to be in the Georgia Art Education Association Capital Art Exhibit. This is a statewide art show which showcases artwork of students K-12. Alejandra traveled to Atlanta in Fevruary for Youth Art Month. She met with legislators who were impressed with her art talent (and her nice manners, too!)  Way to go!

 

Ashley and
 

Yessenia's poems were submitted for publication in the 2005 edition of the Anthology of Poetry by Young Americans. Wow!

 

And I say a great big congratulations for all of you "Blooming Bloggers"!
What a great year!

Hip! Hip! Hooray!

Testing is over! Now that's good news! We get to meet again in the morning. I have missed you!

We have a new class blog from a fifth grade class.......
 
Mr. Milligan's Page

Take a look and notice the student blogs on the left hand side of the page. Also, notice Mr. Milligan's first post and be thinking about how you might answer that.  We will take some time to correspond with this class - what fun!

Then we are really going to put our heads together and work on our writing/blogging project.  See you bright and early in the morning.  As usual, I can't wait!

Get on the Blog Train!

Don't you love the name of this post? I have to tell you that it came straight from Amy Bowllan's K-F LIBRA/TECH BLOG: "TEACHING IN THE 21ST CENTURY". She had been nominated for Blog Rookie of the year by Will Richardson.  Do you know what rookie means? (If not, we'll be discussing that tomorrow.)

The neat thing is that she nominated all of you as "Blog Rookies of the Year" on her "Get on the Blog Train" post.! She points people to your weblogs and shares your writing tips.

Here are just a few of the writing tips they offered. By the way, Yessenia and Ashley (two of her students) are published poets! They have a great site and when you visit them you'll read why blogging in education is so important.

 Then she quotes Yessenia, Shelby, Paulina, Ashley, Patrick and Maria! I say "Hats Off" to a group of incredible "Blooming Bloggers!"

J. H. House Eagles Soar!!!

A nice schoolboard member once said that J. H. House eagles don't flock, they soar! That sure fits today. Will Richardson, a blogging colleague of mine, recognized your good work on a post today.

He also discovered this article in the March issue of Technology and Learning. Now Will found this article before I did. I read his blog and I was so happy for J. H. House to be recognized. Isn't the blogging world great? We bloggers help each other keep up! Thanks, Will!

The article features J. H. House Elementary School as  the School Site of the Month!!!! That is quite an honor for you and your school. Boys and girls, they talk about your weblogs, our class weblogs and all the other blogs that J. H. House has created this year.

I think you have some of the best ideas and absolutely some of the best voices on the web. This nice recognition is received in a very large part because of your hard work all year long.

Here is a quote straight from the author, Susan Brooks-Young.

"All the participants comment on each other's posts-an excellent example of how members of a school community can share ideas electronically."

J. H. House eagles are soaring once again.  I am so very proud of you!!

Kudos to Patrick

Now this is something I just had to share. Patrick, you should be very proud! Nancy Mckeand is currently teaching in an intensive English program in a small college in Louisiana. She is especially interested in the teaching of writing. Here's her post about Patrick:

A Great Post

I just read Patrick's post thanking people who have encouraged him. I think it is an excellent post. 

I wish my college-aged students knew how to integrate a quote into a text as well as Patrick did - and he's only in 5th grade!

Way to go, Patrick!

Tips from TheWriteTeam

Your posts today were excellent! I just had to pull one from each of you to share on our class blog. Here goes!

Alejandro - Hey! Would you like to transform your writing into a masterpiece? Do you want to have interesting facts and fascinating subjects. You need to have some tips from Alejandro. Tip number one, try to include vivid words. Vivid words are better  when they are adjectives and exclamations. An exclamation is a word that expresses feelings such as Wow!

Yessenia - Organize your writing so that it makes your writing seem nice and neat.

Shelby - Read your story over and over again until you KNOW it is the right one.

Paulina - A very good tip is to always use vivid words. Never leave an overused  word   in your paper. If you do, your paper will look very ordinary. If you change the words your paper will look great.

Patrick - When you write you  must write with understandable words. You must use words that you and the reader can understand. So don't just use words that sound good and you don't know what they mean use words that you know.

Maria - How,When,&Where shows ADVERBS! they uaually end in ly.

Marcos - grab the readers attention with a catchy lead. Here is an excellent introduction written by Alejandro.  Hey! would you like to transform your writing into a masterpiece?  A catchy lead can make readers read your writing.

Lacey - You should always try to do  your best in writing . Even if you don't know anything about it or the problem has never happened to you!You can make it up. As long as it sounds real to you and a classmate or who ever is reading it! Then you would be proud of yourself!   

Juan -  My last writing tip is to have your own personal voice. Express your personality and have a conversation with an authur and try not to make your story so  boring that no one will like to read it. When I mean your own personal voice I mean showing expression on your writing and honoring your punctuation meaning to slow down on your writing. Don't let anyone judge you about your writing and be proud of what you wrote about. 

Jhonathan -  One of the tips is to grab the attention. It helps so the reader will attach to it. Add a idiom or act like your  talking straight to them.This is one of the great tips.

Estefany - My comment is to reread what you wrote and omit what does not sound right and makes a person not into the story.

Ashley -  Pretend you are writing to a very important person.

Alejandra - Check your spelling!! Checking your spelling helps your writing a lot. I sometimes forget to check my spelling ,but I always try. It messes your writing if you forget.

Adrieana - Never write bad comment to someone who has write a bad comment to you. Or never respond to someone who wrote a bad comment to you. So remember all of these tips.

Six Traits of Writing Brainstorming

Wow! You did a wonderful job thinking about the different writing traits. I am so excited about your project. I think we are going to come up with something really good.

I was really pleased with your group work. Everyone cooperated and worked hard.  I thought I'd provide a review of your work here.

Ideas and Content

• What is my topic?
• Is my paper clear?
• Did I try to make my writing come alive?
• Do I have enough details?
• Do I have a good beginning, middle and end?
• Does my reader understand what I am trying to say?
• Have I included any dialogue?
• What about writing my ideas down and choosing the best one?
• Do I have an organization?
• Do I have enough ideas?

Organization

• How does my topic start?
• Are the details in order?
• Is my paper easy to read?
• Is my paper in time order?
• Does my writing have a good beginning?
• Are all the details in the correct sequence?
• Do my links go with my message?
• How does my topic end?

Voice

• Is this interesting to me?
• Did I give my opinion?
• Did I say everything I wanted to?
• What did I like the most?
• Did my readers feel like they heard my voice?
• Do I like what I wrote?
• Am I comfortable with what I wrote?
• Does the story match my attitude?
• How do I want my readers to feel?

Word Choice

• Did I use different or interesting words?
• Have I used any exciting words?
• Did you use vivid vocabulary?
• Does your writing flow?
• Will they make a good comment?
• Do you have descriptive words?
• Did I grab my readers attention with my words?
• Are my words in the right place?

Sentence Fluency

• Did I use a lot of sentences?
• Did I use complete sentences?
• Did I use correct sentences?
• Do my sentence beginnings have big and different ideas?
• Do my sentences make sense?
• Does my story sound real?
• Did I complete what I was trying to say?
• Did I use the same starting words?
• Does my paper sound smooth as I read it aloud?
• Did I use some long and some short sentences?

Conventions

• Do my words have spaces between them?
• Does my title go with my story?
• Does my punctuation show my sentence expressions?
• Do I have spelling errors?
• Do I have the correct capitalization in my sentences?
• Can people understand my writing?
• Does my paper have a main idea?
• Is my paper understandable?
• Did I use correct punctuation?

Think about this. We want the same tense throughout. We want it to flow. We want to see if we have more ideas. Consider ways we can shape it up into a useful and dynamic project. We'll talk next week about where we'll go from here. I have a good feeling about this. I wish Thursday were here already!  :-)