The Second Grade News

The second grade has the children write in journals a lot. It is both part of weekly homework
and part of the weekly in class grind.   As the year progressed, many of the kids slacked off with their writing.
They would put down the bare minimum but not push themselves in a creative direction. 
Then we came up with the idea of publishing the children's writings and sending them
to both teachers and parents via email. 
The quality of writing drastically improved.  The children had a real purpose for writing.
Other people would be reading what they produced. 
Technology played an important part in motivating the children to improve in quality. 
Just an additional aside:  previous years when I did a newspaper, I would print out many, many
copies to give to teachers and parents.  It took much ink and much paper and much time.
With my elists to parents and my elists to teachers, I can easily send the paper
to many, many people and not use much ink at all. 
Email is wonderful!