The Blog Bug

I have spent quite a few hours over the past week updating and reorganising my blog, making use of the new features now available. It's good to give it a fresh look every now and then, especially after being away from it for such a long time.

Apart from changing the template, I have put more links down the side, which will be helpful for teachers as well as parents helping their children to learn. I have also moved some of the external pages onto the blog, using the tabbed additional pages.

It seems I am not the only one in the house who enjoys blogging...

Little Z has had her own blog for a while now, although she too has somewhat neglected her blog for the past year or so and is only now getting back into it. She spent hours yesterday just changing the design of her template. My next task is to encourage her to write posts more frequently, which will boost her confidence in writing and generally improve her basic computer skills. She is already a very good speller and a regular reader, but writing regularly will hopefully help her to make appropriate vocabulary choices and to organise her ideas.

Big J has a blog now too. It is a well known fact that many boys are turned off by the idea of writing creatively, but I know that many of them would enjoy writing more if they were excited by what they were writing about. So, although he is not yet 13 and cannot really have a blog of his own, I have set this one up, which I can supervise and he can use as his own. He has the incentive of having links to all his favourite games and websites on there, so he will keep going back to it!

Last week, a teacher said to me "There's nothing like writing for a purpose." It is so true. This week, I worked with a 10 year old boy who wrote an outstanding letter to a company to give his opinion on a new concept he'd read about. His use of language was amazing for a boy of his age- better than many adults. It made me wonder what I could do to encourage Big J to become such a competent writer; to become 'a writer' as opposed to just 'a boy who can write'. That's when I decided he needed a blog.

I have already seen an improvement in his editing skills. He has started reading his sentences back to himself, correcting mistakes and making improvements to his sentences by varying his sentences starters and by adding adjectives, adverbs and connectives. These are all things he knows how to do, but when writing his own thoughts on his own blog, it is more important to him that he gets it right and he doesn't need prompting. He has only just started, but as a boy with an amazing imagination, I am looking forward to seeing how his writing develops.

My next job is to convince him to put some of his fantastic pictures onto a page of his blog.