Hello BlogPals,

The past few days have brought snow and ice to our area of Pennsylvania. We had “snow days” on Tuesday and Wednesday, which means that the schools were closed! We didn’t get a lot of snow (only about 3 inches) but we also got a thick coating of ice which made everything really slippery. They closed the schools because it was too dangerous to send the school buses out on the slippery roads. It was fun having two days off…but it means we couldn’t do much work on our introductory posts. Now that we’re back in school, we’ll work on these and get them posted as soon as we can. We just didn’t want our blogpals to think we’d forgotten.

So…does it ever snow in Thailand or Singapore? Are there any kinds of weather events that ever cause your schools to close? PA blogpals, how did you spend your snow days?

Yesterday our class learned what a blog is and how it can help us to be better writers. We learned that the steps of the writing process that we use for all our other writing will still apply to blogging. We’ll still think about our ideas, write a draft, share it with someone to get their feedback, revise and edit as needed and then finally, when it’s ready, we’ll publish. The big difference is that when we publish a blog post it’s on the Internet for the whole world to see! That made us think twice about what we’ll say and how we’ll say it.

We visited the blog of our partner school in Bangkok. They had just posted about their introduction to blogging so we are already learning from them! Thanks Ms. C., Mrs. S., and students for helping us learn more about blogging and Internet safety.

Today, we’ll all find our blog online and look around a little. We’ll also learn about comments. Third graders, let’s give commenting a try. Tell us one thing you are looking forward to in our BlogPals project and one important thing that you’ve learned so far.

Hello, third graders! Welcome to your class blog. We will use this blog to make new friends and learn more about the world. You will do a lot of reading and a lot of writing. We will also learn about being safe on the Internet and about being good digital citizens.

Get ready! It’s going to be an adventure!