Our School Blog is OPEN!

sanpasec.blogspot.com is the link to get to our school blog! It'll be edited by the A2 group. It's been opened by Vale Becker, and it's really exciting! Check it out, and get ready to receive invitations to have your students submit work to it.

English Department Project
I'd like us to get organized in order to make the blog popular. I really feel it's a great idea, easy to implement and motivating for everyone at school and Yerba Buena. Our challenge is to turn it into a sight where our students will feel reflected, and will therefore check it out even if they have not been asked by a teacher or because they need to complete an assignment.

Until we get there, it'll be up to us to make them start contributing to it. So here is a list of mini-projects you could plan to implement as soon as we get back from winter break:

Book review: especially for grades 7-9, students could write a review of any of the books they read in their SSR time. To do this, you could get book reviews from The New York Times as model of structure, contents, and style (click on it to go to their Book Review section). Students could then write their own reviews and include a picture of the cover of the book, or their own drawing or collage of pictures about it, or pics of a movie based on it, also get the first chapter if you can find the full text online (many books are published online, but I guess they won't be simplified versions). Make sure they annotate the bibliographical information correctly, and they finally submit their work to you as a class project. You can choose three to five pieces, make copies and distribute to everyone. In groups, following an agreed upon set of criteria, they will decide which (1 or 2) will be sent to the editors for publication in the school blog.

Article review: the same procedure can be implemented for the review of interesting articles. The range of topics can as broad as our students' interests! It would be nice to have an article review and a book review every single week. This means that more people will get published! AND this would add a 'global' taste to the blog.

Just about anything! Think of any class project as possible subject for a journalistic piece that could be shared with the whole school. Always keep in mind that, though academic, it has to be written in such a way as to attract the reader's attention. This could include interviews, research on any topic, etc. Go to the blog and see the sections it'll include. Examples that I can think of is the 7th grade video project. If you complete anyone, e.g. a commercial/an interview, pick the best one and submit it to the school blog for everyone at school to enjoy! If you are doing a role play on a book read in class, a picture of it could accompany a written review of the book. This week you could work on a film review, next time on a sports event in Tucuman, then maybe cover an important global event and discuss how the issue is presented in different countries, have your artistically inclined kids to draw cartoons that may depict some current event in Yerba Buena or Tuc or Arg or the world, make any event that attract our students' attention and make it a class project to get published, etc. etc. etc. The possibilities are endless. If you'd like to brainstorm together about how you could turn any class content into an interesting article for the school blog, just let me know we'll talk about it!

It would be nice if by the end of August each class you teach has produced a few pieces worth publishing. How about making this your monthly objective for August and leave it incorporated into your curriculum somehow? We'll definitely explore ways to keep this going - I strongly believe the possibility of getting published will add an exciting flavor to any class assignment. Let's talk about it! For more questions, doubts, suggestions, etc. just holler!