Tweets about Reading

It's been a while since I've done any blogging, and I think part of that is because I'm not sure I've done anything really new and different to blog about. My fifth graders are moving along, and we've been working on writing realistic fiction stories, and reading responses, and creating posters with nonfiction text features just to try and mix up the way they write about their reading. But it's now the middle of February, and things that were once fresh seem to be not so fresh, and I think both students and their teachers start looking for ways to mix up the daily work a bit.

I was scrolling through my Twitter feed, and found a link to a poster called "101 Ways to Show What You Know." I squinted at it on my phone, but I was intrigued. I needed some new ideas for students to write about with their reading, but the standard one-paragraph response was old for all of us.  (Here's a link to that poster.)  And then it hit me: it was a short week, and the kids wouldn't have had as much time for reading, so they needed something short. Like a tweet. Even though I don't have a class Twitter page, the kids could still write a couple of 140-character tweets about the plot, the setting, characters or character change, or if it was nonfiction, something interesting that captured their attention about whatever it was their book was about. I assigned them the job of writing at least two tweets, and they could include an appropriate hashtag, probably using the book title.

They seemed to love it. For one thing, they were thrilled it wasn't 140 words, just characters, including spaces between words. Then I had them type them into our Kidblog page, so they could see what other kids had written. I was taken with how funny I thought many of them were, but also how much information they could put into a short response. Below are some of the results:

The ring: twist it once or twist it twice, but think twice before you twist it #Monster Ring
Big Gruff is totes too big for the troll so Gruff throws the troll off the bridge #Fat Billy Goats

Just Hates Ms.Godfrey because he just hates her #Big Nate

Monsters, Nightmares, Dangerous Gods, Can't I have a normal life#Percy Jackson

He paid $5.00 for a kiss? o.m.g #kissing booth #Dork Diary

The Story Of Helen Keller Was SO SAD Cause Helen Keller Was Blind And Deaf # SO SAD

I don't want to go to another school next year, I'm going to fail school so I can stay with my teacher #failschool#mrteruptfallsagain

I've got a request in to see if I can set up a class Twitter account, so more families could see some of these ideas, but for now, the kids can read them on Kidblog. I will certainly try this again this year, because it made writing a reading response a bit more fun.