Tweeting On The 2nd Day of Kindergarten!

What a wonderful 2 days of Kindergarten! Sometimes when you least expect it, something amazing happens and my students teach me something new.

I use twitter for myself and my students. This year I was planning on scaffolding something similar to what I did last year. Starting with introducing the twitter symbol, the bird and beginning to create a “live feed” of ideas in the classroom that represent our ideas of what we do in kindergarten and what we would like to share. Then I was planning on comparing our “classroom feed” with the live feed on our class twitter account.

Then one of my students noticed my “twitter bird” on top of my speaker and asked what it was. I shared that it was our classroom bird and we would use it when we tweet! My students started asking questions about what tweeting was and so I began talking about tweeting! I shared our classroom twitter account on the SMARTboard and read some of the tweets that a class of Kindergarten students at Yokohama International School in Japan had posted. As I read the tweets to my students they were interested and started making connections with some of the things I read. So I decided to begin tweeting! I gave our “twitter bird” to one of my students and asked what she would like to tweet and so it began! My students took turns passing the bird around to anyone who wanted to tweet.

This was so powerful as a teacher. It reminded me of how much we plan and organize resources to introduce new ideas and experiences to our students. I think about how important scaffolding is when introducing new ideas, but yesterday I was reminded at how simple, something abstract can be experienced in such a meaningful and authentic way.

Now that my students have had this experience we will tweet again on Tuesday and introduce ourselves to our friends in Japan! Twitter opened my eyes and my students eyes yesterday to the world. Wonderful!