Many Voices
This is a part of Aaron’s comment to a recent post I wrote.
“Weblogs present such a great opportunity for inspiring young writers. That alone makes them worthy of consideration. When you add the ‘perspective of many voices’, it becomes a great learning opportunity as well; to expand one’s awareness and see reality from different perspectives. That can be beneficial for everyone!”
“That alone makes them worthy of consideration” is a phrase that has been running through my mind ever since Aaron wrote it. This is so true and I can give you a perfect example that emerged today as I was working with my Wrinkles group.
To give you a little background, SuperThinker has been busy visiting many weblog sites over the past months. She has visited my students’ sites many times and the support and reinforcement she gives them has really helped them and me. She is my team weblogger who gives my students the audience they need to let them know that their writing efforts do not go unnoticed. She has been busy as a beaver setting up another fifth grade class to share idiom weblogs, our Idioms Are Fun! and their Ms. P’s 5th Grade Bloggers: WE’VE GOT A WORLD OF IDEAS! Now, today my students began welcoming these fifth graders to the world of weblogging by lending them a hand by coming up with idiom sentence to complement the work one of Ms. P’s students had created. Notice how the community keeps building.
Now, I started off with Aaron’s post because his comment that “weblogs do present such a great opportunity for inspiring young writers” that has been running through my head inspired me to work even harder with my young group of writers. Notice how the community connects and encourages.
My next post will be dedicated solely to Emily, who wrote a piece on idioms today that needs to be celebrated. I had asked them to think about things going on everyday and write a story full of as many idioms as they could use. Now, I had modeled a short story for them last week and this is not an easy task. Getting the story to flow, make sense, and have just enough details to make the idioms make sense is no easy task but Emily rose to the occasion! She chose to write about SuperThinker, her new weblog friend who is honoring Emily’s voice as well as sharing her own voice. Notice the many voices that are combining to support this wonderful young writer…….
February 13th, 2004 at 1:55 pm
It IS the community that makes blogging work. We are each other’s audience, sounding boards, fans, and best supporters! It’s because of the feedback–the community–that I, as well as SuperThinker, do what we do! (That, and a shameless blogging habit–does that count?) Anyway–it’s so much fun, and inspiring, to read the impressive work that your students have been producing. When our 5th graders read some of their posts, I think they got a little scared (like you said about Will’s class when they mentored your class.) They saw the quality of the work and asked several times if the kids were ALL 5th graders. I reassured them that their writing is so good because they’ve been implementing their learnings through their blog, and hopefully, that’s what these kids and their teacher will do–with a little help from their blogging friends!