Monday, 24 May 2010

Family Blogging & Summer Writing

Still on a high from the summer reading workshop, a friend stopped me the other day to pitch an idea:

What if I held a tandem workshop on summer writing, but from the perspective of setting up a family blog and providing this fun, authentic opportunity for kids to continue their writing over the vacation?

Needless to say, I loved the idea and set out to find Chrissy, our soon-to-be tech gal in elementary. She was keen as well and we dove right into the planning.


Keeping it simple, we focused on three things:

Why? (why would you blog? what kind of blog will you have?)

How? (getting them set up from the ground up--we used Wordpress because it's the platform our students will use in school)

What? (what will kids and parents write about?)

Creating the list of cool things to blog about was fun and gave me ideas for my own family blog this summer. Our main goal here was to really encourage the family aspect of the blog. What kinds of memories are families creating and wouldn't it be awesome to have them all written down as a digital scrapbook? Why not all take turns writing a post?

Here's what we came up with:

1. Places You Are Visiting

2. Good Books You've Read

3. Day Trips

4. Reflections (my favorite part of the day)

5. Top Ten (things to do on a rainy day, restaurants in my hometown, ways I annoy my brother during the break)

6. Best and Worst of the Summer

7. Artwork

8. Photography piece (how to start noticing things more)

9. A Day in the Life of...

10. In My Own Backyard (science, flowers, wondering--use video for this)

11. Visitors

12. Mapping Out Your Special Place (draw a map of finding small moments in the map)

13. Things To Do In Our Town

14. Food

15. Small Moments

We had about 25 interested and engaged parents in attendance this morning. The workshop was fun and parents gave us tons more ideas about what they want to learn next.

1 comment:

Miss M said...

I love the idea of having students and their families blogging together over the summer! I'll be interested to hear about the results:)