It was one of those days where everything you plan goes out the window. We had lots we were going to do but it got put to the side as we focused on getting our poems done for the book. It took us all day but we are one day closer to having our published book. As the students finished up any remaining poems that needed to be finished, we also looked at various covers to bind our books in and staring thinking of titles. So far we have a very creative list of titles including:
Poems for Family and Friends
Poems That Fill Your Head With Pictures
Mom, I want to Stay Up and Read
Peace to Poems and Goodwill Towards Books
Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening, Good Night Poems
Poems That Fill Your Head With Good Thoughts
Poems For Life
For Poems Give Me Strength to Read
Poems For Reading Out Loud
Everlasting Poems
Listen Once, Read Twice
We Write, You Read
We should be ready to send in the poems by Friday and then we wait . . .
There is no spelling this week as it is a short week. The kids are strangly happy about that. Hmmmmm . . . .
In homes without rules about Internet use, 74% of children report that an adult is never present when they use the Internet.
I didn’t get a chance this week to continue on with our discussion on Internet Safety. So here is another way for your child to stay safe on the Internet.
2. Doing Safe Searches: While not foolproof, many search sites give you control over what types of images or sites should be displayed when you are doing a search. For example
Google allows you to choose from 3 types of searches as shown below:
You can also use sites like
Yahoo Kids or
Quintura for Kids. Both sites work hard to make sure that your results are kid friendly. They’re still not perfect though so make sure that your child knows what to do should they come across anything inappropriate. I usually suggest the 3 sec rule in that if a child comes across anything inappropriate, they have 3 secs to turn the screen off and come find you (though that part might take a little longer than 3 secs!). However, make sure you child understands that coming across these things accidentally will not get them in trouble.
Even at this age, and especially as they get older, children and teenagers are afraid of telling parents about anything bad or inappropriate that may be happening on the internet, whether it is coming across inappropriate sites or being bullied online. They are afraid of having their computer privileges revoked or having the internet disconnected. Particularly at the older ages, students would rather try and deal with these things themselves and not get parents involved if it means their internet use is disrupted. For students, their use of technology like instant messaging, texting on cell phones or even the cell phones themselves is an important part of their social life and is important to them in connecting and retaining relationships with their peer group. To them, taking away this technology substantially hurts their social standing. Thus they would rather go try and solve these issues alone. We need to make sure that the door to communication is always open and that our children are not afraid to let us know when these things are happening.
By now, you all should have seen the poetry books our class created. I think they look pretty awesome. The class did a wonderful job and the book looks great. Each child got a free book. However, if you would like to purchase more, you can go to the lulu.com website and order as many as you like. They will make them on order and ship them to you. The address is . . . .
