Classroom News from Room 182

Tammi Fitzgerald's fourth graders love to write... and they love to write a lot about a lot of things! Many students would even choose creative writing after completing classroom assignments. 

Tammi developed some choice boards to provide writing ideas and structure for her early finishers. Kids jumped on the choice boards, which led to a deluge of emails with requests to print. It soon became too hard to manage, and Tammi means this in the best possible way. She didn't want to shut down their appetite for writing but needed a better way to provide them with meaningful writing opportunities.

She then pitched the idea of a class newspaper, and the answer was a resounding yes. Tammi created a template in Canva with places for students to pop in their content. It wasn't long before students took over -- dragging and dropping text boxes, inserting photos, and changing the backgrounds. 

There is always the fear of losing work with collaborative files. Tammi advises having students write in Google Docs and then paste the text into Canva. This practice has saved them more than once.

Around the two-week mark, students were ready to present the first edition of Classroom News from Room 182. Even though Tammi is who planted the seed, the kids take complete ownership of the newspaper. Her job has been to only add a little polish at the end and email the newspaper's biggest fans with the final product -- the students' families.

Kristin Patrick, Blended Learning Coach