Why Student Blogs are So Valuable

I read Cassie's blog yesterday, and thought about it several times throughout the evening.  I woke up this morning and thought about it again.  She really nailed it.   She compared the meanness in Larger-Than-Life Lara with what she sees and feels some times at school.

As we work towards improving higher level thinking, and writing that supports ideas and opinions with explicit and intricate details, she  wrote a post that was extraordinary.  However, there were many mistakes in PUGS (Punctuation, Usage, Grammar, and Spelling).  Her post shows how blogging will build writing skills, while pushing students to think, and reason, and consider themselves, their lives, and how people treat others.

Opinions are sometimes really mean like when someone talks about you.  When you talk about them and it is not nice but it could be nice sometimes. When people do that it is just like them talking about you. How would you feel if someone talked about you? It would not feel to good. 

That is why I don’t like it when my friends make fun of people to make them look cool. It just makes them look like a jerk.  I don’t like it when people talk about people. It is just really mean. I really think that if we don’t talk about people there would be no fights at school and for people who do talk about people need to stop.

Don’t talk about people because when people do it just gets back at them and they talk about kids. People don’t like it when you talk about them because all it does is  start a fight. So thats why I don’t but I’m not going to lie. I have talked about people but I quit.

This was a super job relating Cassie's life to the book I am reading aloud in Reading Workshop.  As her writing skills improve, great thoughts like these will be a topic for discussion and growth for her, and her classmates.
Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinhutton/86405062/in/set-72157605053379133/

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