2018 CLASSROOM SOLSC FOR STUDENTS: DAY 4 OF 31
Back for More! Day 4 of the Classroom Slice of Life Story Challenge!
2018 CLASSROOM SOLSC PADLET
ANNOUNCEMENTS
- If your students are slicing from their personal blogs, then you should link their blog posts together using your classroom hub or personal blog. Then, share the permalink to the location of the “round up” of student slices. (Click here for more information on how to do this.) Individual students CANNOT link here directly. Students who are under 18 must have an adult linking for them. Any student links left without an adult link will be deleted.
- Only post the link to your students’ slices of life here. Do not post the link to your personal slice of life stories here.
- If this is the first comment you’ve left on Two Writing Teachers, then we will have to moderate your comment. We will be checking throughout the day in order to get your links up for the community as soon as possible. As long as you use the same username/email to log in going forward, your comments should appear instantly in the future,
- We invite you to copy the Classroom SOLSC badge and use it on your blog(s).
INSPIRATION/TODAY’S QUESTION
Today’s Question for Classroom SOLSC Teachers: What is your best tip for teaching students to thoughtfully comment on each other’s blogs? Please respond in the comments below.
For returning participants: Note the change to this year’s challenge. Instead of leaving the permalink in the comments, please leave your permalink in the padlet and respond to the daily question/inspiration instead!
QUESTIONS?
After reading the information in the links above, if you still have questions about the Classroom SOLSC contact one of us. (Please don’t use Twitter or Facebook to contact us with SOLSC questions).
- If your last name begins with the letters A – G, please email questions to DebFrazier4{at}gmail.com.
- If your last name begins with the letters H – M, please email questions to beth{at}elizabethmoore.work.
- If your last name begins with the letters N- S, please email questions to Lanny Ball lanny.ball[{at}gmail.com.
- If your last name begins with the letters T – Z, please email questions to Kathleen Sokolowski mrs.sokolowski{at}gmail.com.
We respond together for the first couple of times and create the criteria together. We hope to start responding this week to other classes.
I do several mini-lessons about how to write meaningful comments where we analyze excellent comments students have made in the past and think through a comment together on a TWT post. I also post a chart with tips & possible sentence-starters and periodically give dedicated time in class for commenting. I also make sure to model by leaving quality comments on all my students’ posts in a fairly timely fashion.
However, all of those things often still don’t result in buy-in until students experience the emotional impact of receiving a wonderful comment from someone other than me, so I make sure to celebrate the first few student commenters who really leave a great comment. Another huge factor this year was realizing that students were not truly internalizing why I was “making” them leave comments, so I pulled them together for an honest discussion and had them share the possible reasons, which was really powerful.
I actually wrote a post about this about a month ago because this is the first year I’ve really gotten them into commenting the way I’ve always envisioned, and I’m so excited! You can read it here: http://ihabloespanglish.blogspot.com/2018/01/a-rising-tide.html
I teach my students the “PQP” technique, Praise Question Polish. This strategy is in Serravallo’s Writing Strategies book (or possibly Reading Strategies). It’s simple, yet effective!
We read a few posts together as a class, and then talk about what would make a good comment. We build success criteria from that experience.
Our biggest focus in to BE KIND!
For our comments, we leave three things: 1) Why we enjoyed the writing. 2) A connection we made with the writing. 3) A question to keep the conversation going.