December 7

A Brand New Start

Over the past several months I’ve wondered whether or not we should have a blog.  I haven’t posted anything for quite a while.  In fact, sometimes I’m not even sure what to post.  It’s like I’ve had a “writer’s block.”  You know, when you’ve come to a point where you just can’t think of anything to write.  For instance, your teacher asks you to brainstorm a list of ideas about the 10 Craziest Summer Moments from your last vacation.  You sit and a small ball of energy bounces around in your stomach as you begin to think, This could be great!  But that’s when it hits you.  You can’t think of one crazy moment you had last summer that you could write about.  Ahhh!  That’s been happening to me a lot.  So, I’ve placed the blog low on my list of things to do.

Trying to give our dog Zhosur a bath this summer was my Crazy Moment.

Trying to give our dog Zhosur a bath this summer was my Crazy Moment.

I came back to it recently as I’ve been thinking about what might help us accomplish our class purpose.  It’s there on our tagline on the front page.  A word was sticking out to me-“Fun.”  That word is pretty important in education.  It really helps to have an interest in what you’re doing to help with accomplishing your learning goals.  This may not be possible all of the time, but we should make thing as enjoyable as possible in an effort to learn.  Also, writing is pretty fun and kids like to share it with others.  A blog could help us to do that.

Then it hit me.  This doesn’t just have to be my blog.  It could be our classroom blog.  We could all contribute and work towards improving it.  So, I’ve started a small learning journey.  I came up with a question for the class:

“To what extent are you interested in having a classroom blog?”

We used a special tool to come to consensus.  In short, most kids really liked the idea.  In fact, only 1 student was completely opposed.  So, I began asking more questions.

“What theme would you want to use to showcase our blog?”

The kids voted and decided to go with Cubic.

Then, I asked kids for suggestions for names.  We talked about our blogging purpose and audience.  We discussed blogging about classroom, school and education news topics.  We figured most people reading would be kids, parents and teachers.  This helped us to eliminate a few suggested Titles for the blog, like “Lebron James.”  Pretty funny guys.  Anyway, the new title is simple and clearly related to our work.  “Mr. Magill’s Classroom”

I think the work has really just begun.  I’m not sure where it’s headed, but stay posted to our blog, and hopefully we’ll have some more posts real soon that have been created with class input.  I think it’s time to start fresh and share about the happenings that are going on in our classroom.