Our Blog

ImagineLearningCenter.blogspot.com

My inspiration: Why I started the Blog.
      As preschool teachers an important part of our job is having good communication with parents and families. Parents came to me all the time asking what we were doing in class. They all shared a similar frustration of asking their child about their day and not getting a response. I have thought over the years of different ways I could bridge this home/school gap. The blog came out of this need.

      One of the ways I get inspiration for the projects I do with the children is through different craft blogs I have discovered over the years. I was looking at one of my favorites and it occurred to me that I could do a blog too. I figured it couldn’t be that hard. I did some research and found that Google had a blog site that seemed very user friendly .I did my first blog post and made it private at first. I wanted to make sure that I had the permission of the owners of Imagine before I made the blog available for public viewing. It turned out to be a good idea because one of the owners of Imagine had many legal concerns that he needed to think about. He was clear that he was not ok with pictures of the children being on the blog. I wondered if pictures of the children would be ok if we got signatures from all the parents giving their permission for us to use photographs of their children. He still seemed unsure but I figured there would be no harm done to just ask some of the parents to see how they would feel about it. It was interesting because some parents were really ok with it and others were absolutely not. Good to know, great to know, imperative to know. In case you don’t know, it’s not legal to use pictures of children without the written consent of their parents. I cannot emphasize this enough.

      In the beginning I was a bit worried about having a blog without being able to see children’s faces. It seemed so strange to crop their sweet smiling faces out the pictures. Then I realized that the blog wasn’t to show parents cute pictures of their children but to show what their children were doing in the classroom. It was through this understanding that my thinking began to change. I got better and better at taking pictures of the children doing projects without showing their faces. I didn’t need to crop out their faces I just needed to take pictures of small, capable hands involved in meaningful activities.

      The parent’s response to the blog has been very positive. They feel like they are more in tune with the activities their children are partaking in while at school. They feel they have a frame of reference in which to ask question of their children that may result in a response. They also can look at the blog with their child.  I believe that the reason that it is hard for a child to answer questions about their day is because they live in the moment and what happened in the past is less important then what is happening now. When a parent looks at the blog with their children it brings the child back to the moment in a tangible way that really spurs some productive conversation about their time in school.

      The blog celebrated its year birthday in February and I remain it’s very proud Momma. I am always trying to figure out ways to improve on it. Recently I experimented with different ways of editing the photographs. It took more time but I think the results were worth it. I am also starting to add more information for the parents about why we do the kinds of activities we do. I am attempting to make connections between the projects we do and their educational significance.

      When I first started the blog one of my concerns was whether I would be able to keep up with it. I didn’t want to create it, get the parents excited about it and then drop the ball. I have found the opposite to be true in fact. I love doing the blog and feel that it feeds my creativity. The more posts I put up the more projects I want to do, the more blogging about those projects I want to do. My advice to anyone who wants to start a classroom blog and is feeling a bit nervous and apprehensive is try it. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Take a deep breath and jump.