Student Blog Samples for Nonfiction Reading

image from kidblog.org website

We are entering our fourth and final week of the Nonfiction Reading unit, using blogs as a response tool. As I explained in my March 29 blog, Launching Blogging During Book Clubs, students are reading nonfiction social justice books in a book club structure, and responding through face-to-face discussions, Reading Notebook summaries and vocabulary work, and through our class blog using Kidblog. Students have used the blog in several different ways. Here are some samples at different levels of thinking:

Students started by doing some background research on the social justice issue reflected in their book: civil rights, Japanese internment, or child labor. They blogged about their learning, and then read and commented on the others in their same-text group. Below is a pretty average blog post (picture not shown, but there is a link included) about the civil rights issue with a better-than-average comment. I like how the blogger very succinctly summarizes the main idea of Nonviolent Social Change, and answers the prompted questions about public awareness and freedom of speech in a smooth way. I like how the commenter picks up on freedom of speech and pushes the blogger to think in a new way about the implications, linking it back to the Six Principles.

For our book club, we are reading a non-fiction books about black civil rights. I have researched about civil rights, to further understand the book. Mostly involving Dr. King Jr. Martin Luther King’s teaching on the theory of nonviolence, called the “Six Steps of Nonviolent Social Change.”  He shows, in these six steps, the way to protest for civil rights without violence. Instead of fighting violently, Martin Luther King Jr. instructed the blacks to fight mentally against the whites. Dr King states that one should not protest against the person doing evil, but the evil itself. Public awareness helps in the fight for their cause, because if more people hear about the protests than more people can share their thoughts on the subject. Luckily freedom of speech is one of the promises of America, because without freedom of speech all the blacks protesting would have been arrested and put in jail, or killed. In the photo shown under, the practice of nonviolence is shown. The blacks in the picture are shown holding up signs to protest against segregation, instead of physically fighting the whites.

I can see you understand the Six Principles of Nonviolence very clearly. However, you seem to think big of freedom of speech. If everyone should have equal freedom of speech, doesn’t that mean a white man could say anything to a black man? How would the black man respond, or react, to that? And how would that reaction fit the Six Principles of Nonviolence, which aspects specifically?

Once students got into their books, they broke it into four parts. For each part, they had to choose one of the thematic social justice questions and blog about how their book answers it. Below is a bare-minimum blog about child labor, answering the question: What allows some individuals to take a stand against prejudice/oppression while others choose to participate in it? The commenter, who is reading a different book about a different issue, gives a positive response but has a limited understanding of what "digging deep into the question" should look like.

In the book “Kids at Work”, the only person who took a stand against child labor was Lewis Hine. But many people participated in child labor because they were business owners who wanted profit for the kids working. Hine took the stand against child labor because he knew that is was wrong for children’s lives to be wasted away by work instead of a meaningful education.

good description and really good digging deep into the question

Students discussed their book and their responses to the social justice questions in same-text and mixed-text groups after each of the four parts. After reading their blogs on each of the three questions, I noticed a general trend that students did not answer the first part of one of the questions: What creates prejudice/ oppression, and what can an individual do to overcome it? Usually students explained what the prejudice/ oppression was in their books, and then talked about attempts to overcome it. This difficulty with cause-effect relationships is something I'd also noticed in Social Studies. I asked them to discuss the cause of their issue within their third same-text book club, and then blog about what they learned, wondered, or understood in a new way based on the discussion. The blog sample below is from a more advanced student who already had a good understanding of the cause of racism; however, I like how he showed his open-minded approach to his group members and added new thinking in his blog post. The commenter, a very advanced student who is reading a different book about the same civil rights issue, found a connection between their books, and added a provocative question to push the blogger even further into the issue of racism.

Today, in our discussion, we discussed the second essential question (What creates prejudice and what can an individual do to overcome it?) and what we wrote as a response to the question. At first, I said that segregation existed because of slavery and how the laws that supported were abolished but the idea of blacks being “lower” than whites never went away. After discussing that with my group they had similar ideas but I learned that it was also because mistreating blacks had almost become a way of life for the whites and it was how they were expected to act and it was also how they were raised, even though    this didn’t apply to all white, since some were more sympathetic than others.

I like how you explained that discrimination had become part of the lifestyle of white people. I agree as I have found in my own book, “The Voice That Changed a Nation”, that racial segregation in the United States had much to do with a sort of discriminatory tradition that ensured that blacks were always below whites in society. Do you think that earlier ideas of blacks being below whites by some natural order affected people even as recently as the 20th century?

Blogging during book clubs has had unexpected advantages for me as a teacher. Students' thinking is so very clearly visible, unlike a discussion where I miss 80% of what students say because I am bopping from group to group and their words disappear once they are spoken. I can access their thinking at any time from any place, and give them individual feedback via comments. It has also allowed an opportunity for differentiation, especially pushing my higher-level students to make new connections and dig deeper into issues. It supports lower-level students as well, because as they read the thinking of their peers, their comprehension is solidified and broadened.

Despite my earlier trepidations (see March 16th: Blogging in Book Clubs), I am pleased with the outcome of this technology integration. It has lifted the level of thinking, writing, collaboration, and my ability to give feedback beyond what was possible through talk and Reading Notebooks alone. Kidblog is easy to use and looks professional. This is definitely one technology integration plan that worked!