Shreya, my daughter has a blog, Uniquely Mine. An RSS feed from her blog can be found right here (just scroll down and see the right column). Anyway, over the past few weeks she has been doing something for extra credit for the science class. Her fifth-grade teacher has asked all students to find stories related to science in the newspaper, create a short writeup about it to share with the other children. I asked her to add another layer of challenge to that. Once she has her report all typed up, she needs to write a short poem about it and post it to her blog.
I asked her to do this partly because I was concerned that she would not be able to keep up her blog once school started. As most people she was very excited to have a blog and wrote a bunch of stuff for it in the beginning. Then life began to take over and her postings grew few and far in between. What was needed, I figured, was a way to keep her writing regularly. So this idea of piggybacking on something she was already doing. The poems she writes are often short and it didn’t seem like much of an imposition to ask her to write little poems based on the science articles she has been finding for her school report.
Well, so far so good. She has a quite a bit of writing (mostly poems) in a genre we have decided to call Sci-Po a.k.a. Scientific Poems! (It’s a obvious ripp-off on the term Sci-Fi). It has also been a lot of fun.
When we first set up the blog, I advised her to not allow commenting. I was not sure what kinds of comments she would generate and it just seemed as if we were asking for trouble (especially exposing a 10 year old to the kind of junk that is prevalent on the Internet). However, after much consideration we finally decided to open up her site and allow people to comment. So if you read this blog, click over to her site and drop her a note. Please, remember this is a 10 year old so be polite š Of course all comments are moderated so I still hope to protect her from some of the nastier aspects of the world (not that I can do that forever but at least I can try).
Anyway, check out her writing. I think you will like it. Here is my favorite. It is a non-sense poem (not a Sci-Po but fun none-the-less) titled, Salt’n Pepa in Santa Fe. Here is is:
Salt’n Pepa in Santa Fe
by Shreya Mishra
Squigles-squagles, pinchley pooh
Slip’n sliding on my shoe
Dimpo-doby dorkly dake
Gently eat the slice of cake
Shickly-bumbly rabbity-red
Back at home, tucked in bed
I was a personnal blogger in the past, i remember myself wrote pems and others thought on many blogs, it was cool, readers come naturally and we share interesting things.
Sean, thank you so much for writing on my daughter’s blog. She was just thrilled to bits – and excited that you could be using her poems in your HIGH SCHOOL class!!!
You are right, this is not something that was done for school. The blog started this summer just as a place for her to share her writing and the whole sci-po thing came from me trying to get her to keep writing – so the idea of piggy-backing on an assignment her teacher had given her.
Now here’s the interesting thing. She doesn’t want anybody in her school (her class-mates, her teachers) to know that she is writing these science poems. I suggested she share them with her class when she makes her science reports – but she said that she would rather not, because it would look like she was drawing attention to herself.
So here’s the ultimate irony. Not just is this not a “school project” it is not a project that she would like to share with school!!
What do you say to that?
Perhaps you… and I… and Shreya all need to take a day “off” sometime soon and just blog. It seems we have all been a little preoccupied in our own little worlds of “work.”
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I just got back from “Uniquely Mine.” I couldn’t help but interact. I love it. The best part? That blog really feels like it is written by a ten year old girl. It seems very honest. I have seen blogs written by elementary school student before… and this one seems truly… genuine. I’m going to venture a guess that this was set up originally at home, and was not part of a “school” assignment. True? I see few examples of blogs originating from school projects that feel owned by the student. (certainly not that it doesn’t exist)
That has me thinking. It has me thinking about the importance of working hard… but having fun while doing so. I seem to be thinking about that quite a lot as of late. Thanks so much for sharing. I look forward to similar interactions with my own girls when they get another year or two under their belt. Fun.