SMLS5 Blog

You came to the write place!

Welcome to all SMLS5 students! This is a new project for you to work on during the 2009-2010 school year. It's called BLOGGING. Blog is short for weblog, or keeping a log on the web, or World Wide Web (WWW). According to Wikipedia, it's a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.

What I want you to do at first is just to "play with" this Blogmeister blog site. You have your own assigned space, shared with your numeric counterpart in the other fifth grade class. Both of you will make entries in your shared space and simply sign your blog entries with your first name. There will be more specific assignments later on, but for now, just write a Welcome entry, inviting your readers to read your blog and comment on it from time to time. Be careful to avoid being too personal, but feel free to talk about what we do in fifth grade at our school, what we're learning, and things like that to start with. Most of all, have fun!

— Mr. Schwan

For our second blog writing project we wrote news articles about our weather hams project. We spent 6 weeks in the Fall meeting twice weekly with amateur radio operators around the world, collecting weather data, culminating with a session just devoted to getting acquainted with our volunteer weather watchers. Ham radio operators love to talk, and it turns out they love to work with children, too! Read all about this project from the students' point of view in our weather hams news articles.

Welcome to our first blog entries of 2008-2009! I have a brand new class, and we've recently finished our touch typing course for this year. Now that we know how to touch type, we're ready to begin our 2008-2009 blogging season. We're hoping you'll come back regularly to see what we've written lately. We love to hear from you via comments right here on the blog site, and/or email. Our class has been working on island stories for a while now. We began this project by reading Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. Then, after much discussion of this story, we wrote our own island stories. Our first blog entries of the 2008-2009 school year begin with these stories. We hope you enjoy them!

Thank you to David Warlick for making our blog even more fun to use. Recently, he announced that he had found a way to add a wysiwyg editor -- what you see is what you get. I'm typing in this editor right now and will try to demonstrate what it can do to my typed text. Next year's fifth graders should appreciate what we have here! Thank you to Mark, a third grade teacher and blogger, for sharing this with me!

For our readers, I encourage you to read this story, too, before you read our student blog posts.

2 Questions to blog about:

1. What evidence do you see in Jonah 1-4 that God is a God of "second chances"?

2. When has God given you "two chances"? Give an example.