L's blog

>>Little Flower Journal<<

I know a lot of people would react to a five-year-old with her own blog in the same way I do to a five-year-old with a cell phone: hunh? How absolutely ridiculous and indulgent and really... ostentatious on the parent's part -- hey, look how cool we are. Our kid has a blog.

So I sort of cringed when I first saw an example of a kid's school blog at The Amazing Discoveries of Dash. But then the idea sort of grew on me. What a great way to create a portfolio of a child's work, and let him or her see it published. And it can be used as tool for all sorts of things, like doing narrations (which I was writing by hand in a notebook, which had the disadvantage of keeping her dictation slow enough for me to write down, and if you know L, you know the lightening speed at which her tongue runs), dictating a journal, teaching her the technology, and another use for the computer beyond games and watching dvds.

We've only been doing it for three days, and so far it's been great. She finds it thrilling to see her words appear on the computer screen; for her it's almost as good as appearing on tv, I think. She's a little more cooperative doing narrations since I can almost keep up with her thoughts, and best of all, she gets to ramble on about her webkinz for as long as my fingers can stand it.

I expect that the novelty will wear off soon, and then the real test of this as an educational tool will begin. I also confess that I'm a little hesitant about how much information will go out about her and her life. I had a photo of her up there at first, but then took it down, though since I have loads of photos of her on this blog, I'm not sure why I'm being so delicate about that, but there it is. Too many television shows about crazy pedophiles stalking the internet, I guess.

In any event, so far, so good. Pretty much all of it is.