Reminder: What should a basic "meets standards" blog post look like?

This post is for students who are struggling with how to structure a basic blog post or relying too much on retell.  Please remember that your blog is a place for you to RESPOND to your reading, not to retell the plot or to merely "review" it.  I want to know where your mind wanders while you are reading or after you put the book down.  If you don't naturally do this, the discipline of having to write a response weekly will help you practice.

Keiame and Mustafa both have great mentor posts that demonstrate this.


Paragraph One: Draw your reader in with an interesting lead.  Give the reader a few sentences of context (character, setting, conflict) so he or she has the basic idea of what is going on.

Paragraph Two: Introduce your THEORY, or your idea about what the book is actually about. Your theory can be about any macro idea or micro detail that is interesting to you. Then, UNPACK your theory...which means you can elaborate on why you believe it or how you came to it to begin with. You can use textual evidence to unpack your theory. 

Paragraph Three: CONNECT your theory to the world outside of the story.  What does the author want you to know, feel or think?  Can you relate to it at all? What does this story have to say about the world or people?

Once you have mastered this basic structure, please feel free to experiment and be creative in your responses. There are plenty of great examples/all star mentors of this, especially HERE.  

804 All Star Mentor of the Week: Max Piersol!

One thing I'm looking for in your blog posts is whether you are retelling too much versus whether you are developing a theory about the book you are reading (remember our Charlotte's Web work? A theory can be a big idea you come up with based on a micro or macro detail...)

Max came up with an interesting theory based on his reading of It's Kind of A Funny Story by Ned Vizzini. Read his post HERE. Check your entries to see if you have been coming up with theories or retelling too much.