Blog Reflection Week!

This week is dedicated to looking back on your first four posts and reflecting as a writer.  How can you improve your writing about reading?  This post goes hand in hand with the paper that you will fill out and return to me about what you learned from this experience.

Good blogging habits:

•          Are you crafting interesting titles that make someone want to read your post?

•          Do you mention “spoiler alert” if you are going to give away the ending?

•          Are you remembering to use good grammar: spelling, capitalization, underline or italicize titles, etc.

•          Are you commenting on other people’s blogs? It is now a part of your weekly blogging responsibility to comment at least once a week.  Have a blog roll of people who you want to read on the side of your blog.  Make sure your display name is your first name and last initial so you can get credit.

Good writerly habits:

•          Do you include context so that the reader doesn’t feel like he/she is jumping into something half way through? (context should be 2-3 sentences in the first paragraph and include the title, author, character, setting and conflict)

•          Are you including too much retell? Your blog posts aren’t a review of a book or a blurb on the back cover.  Your post should be focused an interesting idea that you want to unpack and share. 

•         Are your blog posts focused? Concentrate on one idea (a character, a theme, a line, etc.)

•          Are you using paragraphs? At minimum, you should have an “introduction” paragraph, an “observe/infer/interpret” paragraph and an “extension” paragraph.  These show me that you can write for an audience, that you are doing deep thinking work in your book, and that you are seeing how literature relates to life. 

Good examples: Check out these mentors to see what you can learn from them. You will be choosing one to focus on for your next blog post. 

Ana did a great job making her book relateable to her reader, whether they read the book or not.  Notice how she "bookended" her post to get the reader interested and to leave them thinking.

Layla did a great job structuring her post, making me think and now I want to read Fight Club!

Tori shows how to write a post on unpacking a line and does a great job making the reader think!

Gabi's posts are great examples of the Introduction/Observe+Infer+Interpret/Extension structure!

Sophie's posts are passionate and thought provoking.

Finding Quality Research for Your Social Action Picture Book

Your job in the lab today is to find and print out research on your social action topic so that you can be an informed, educated author who children and trust and believe.  You should have your completed K/W chart and directions in front of you.  This blog post is meant to be an online guide.

1. Revisit the blog post we used for our general social action webquest. Many of those websites will lead you to organizations whose own website has an "overview" that can serve as an article, specific case studies you may want to print and read or even additional websites to check out.

2. Visit M.S. 51's Library Homepage. "Worldbook" may have a great overview for you, "Proquest" may guide you toward interesting articles and "Opposing Viewpoints" might be an interesting read if your topic is controversial (it will show you both sides).  I will have the passwords on the board in the lab.

3. Finally, try a search engine like "google" or "ask." (Remember that these ARE NOT WEBSITES.  You cannot cite "google" on a bibliography.) Use key words about your topic to help you  narrow down all that is on the world wide web: words like "organization," or "nonprofit" alongside your topic may help you get to a website that has solid overviews. 

REMINDERS:

• Make sure your research in CURRENT (the article is from the past few years).  

• Print only what you will READ--it is ok to copy and paste the parts that are relevant to you onto a Word document.  

• As a back up, save your documents in googledocs OR send yourself an email of the websites you are using (have an open email to yourself and just copy and paste the link in the body of the email), just in case!

• Staple all articles to your K/W paper.  We will begin our reading in class together.  

• You will be creating a bibliography for your picture book, so you MUST write down the source of the information.