Ever since my first experience with kids blogging back in the spring of 2005, I’ve struggled to help kids write good comments. I think the problem arises from the comment box itself. It looks like a chat window or text box on a phone. As a result, kids seem to gravitate to writing in SMS-speak, such as “Gr8 post. CU l8tr!” Another problem is that they often want to write a comment but don’t know what to say, so they end up writing unenlightening comments such as, “I like cheese!” and “I am awesome!!!!!!!!!”
As much fun as those comments seem to be to write, they are not very exciting to receive. To that end, I’ve been revising a commenting lesson for fourth grade students for the past month. It finally went live this week. To my delight, at least in the short term, it worked.
I started with this presentation (embedded below). I worked through the first eight slides with them. There are notes for the teacher in the notes section of most slides.
Before showing the embedded video from Mrs. Yollis’ class, I draw a connection to their non-fiction critical literacy unit. One of the lessons from that unit teaches children that when you are researching a question, you are not limited to reading books at your reading level. It is okay to also read books below your reading level. What is important is that the resource is helping you answer your question.
We make that connection in this lesson to both reinforce the non-fiction critical literacy unit and to help them not feel like the video is too babyish for their sophisticated fourth grade selves.
Before they watch the video, I instruct them to try to write down at least two of the tips from the video. If they can write even more, that’s even better.
When I get to slide 9, I show them this document and point out how it has all of their notes from the video. On the second page (not shown here) I list each child’s name followed by a link to a child’s blog post. Mostly I link them to posts on blogs of other students within our school. I do this because blogging is still in its infancy at our school and I want to support our new bloggers.
(Note that this document looks much better in Google Drive. Publishing it to the web to embed here has changed its dementions.)
As students start returning to the group area with their newly drafted blog comments on sticky notes, I give each child someone else’s comment. I instruct them to write their name on the back, read the comment, and place it where they think it belongs on the rubric which I have projected on the wall.
I wanted to have each child defend the placement but there isn’t time in one 45- minute class period. Instead, we have a steady flow from comment drafting to evaluating someone else’s comment to getting feedback from me or that students regarding the comment. It is a bit chaotic but it seems to be a good balance between time available and helping them take the activity seriously. I saw number kids see their note stuck to the “Needs work” section of the rubric grab their note and walk away mutter something like, “I’ll go fix those spelling mistakes right now.”
After making suggested/needed revisions on their sticky note, students go type the comment into the blog I’ve linked them to. The first child or two who finishes early is asked to write a comment for a more difficult post. It seems that in whatever class I select there is always one student whose blog post is only one sentence long. This seems to be a good pairing since the child who finishes early is often a skilled writer. For example, today a girl wrote this comment:
She wrote it in response to this blog post. See why I love my job?
So far, I’ve taught this lesson with two fourth grade classes. In both classes, most kids were able to write a comment which met the requirements listed in the middle section of the rubric. In each class a few students wrote comments which exceeded the expectations. There were usually around 4 who need to keep working. Usually that was due to not using periods or capital, not for not having the needed content.
Most of our student blogs have very few posts at the moment. When they have more on them, I will send parents the commenting guidelines and invite them to start commenting. Hopefully they will invite other relatives and friends of the family to visit the blog and leave comments.
Please feel free to use any of my materials. If you have your own Gmail account you can make a copy of each document and save it to your Google Drive. If you do use them, please let me know how they work for you.