Family Blogging: Autism Awareness

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In early January, our school kicked off our very first Family Blogging month in an effort to get our families excited about our newly created classroom blogs. Teachers and students posted throughout the month, and learned the art of quality commenting. Student bloggers wrote posts at home and emailed them to their teachers via their Gmail accounts and the topics ranged from writing about yoga, Skype, vocabulary words, and even Minecraft. We also had Andra Goodwin , a parent, post on our school blog during that first month about the learning going on in her daughter's first grade class. During the month of January, our school wrote 66 blog posts and 356 comments, with over half by students. 

Almost three months later, student blogging has taken on a life of its own and the posts keep coming. Something that surprised me, though, was the excitement about blogging that has spread to our families. Last week, two of our first grade parents approached me about the possibility of doing some blogging about autism to coincide with April and Autism Awareness month. We met last week, and they walked into my office with books to share and a plan to share their story and information through a seven blog series on autism! Amazing! I am so excited to have them posting as guest bloggers for our school. Today, I received the first post that is scheduled for April 2nd, World Autism Day. I seriously get chills thinking about the power of writing and sharing and how our little Family Blogging month has turned into a vehicle for sharing thoughts, ideas, and feelings for everyone in our school community. 

Please join us in raising autism awareness! Our school will be wearing blue on Wednesday April 2nd in celebration of World Autism Day 2014. 

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