The Blog Squad
Miss Thomson is passionate about instilling a love of literature and thirst for writing within SJSJ. The Blog Squad consists of a group of passionate, emphatic writers who wish to write for pleasure outside of their scheduled writing lessons. It aims to give children a true purpose and audience for their writing, with The Blog Squad providing updates for the school community about key events and the day-to-day running of the school. The Blog Squad will work closely with Miss Thomson to generate ideas for the School Blog, plan and write posts and even take pictures to be shared on the School Blog. This will be delivered through a safe, child-friendly online blog which will then be shared frequently with the school community. We know this will create an engaged community of writers at SJSJ and will promote writing as a fun and exciting extra-curricular activity.
Class Representatives
These are our Blog Squad members for this academic year:
- Year 3 – Ava-Leigh and Teddy
- Year 4 – Ahria and Valentina
- Year 5 – Amayah and Ayah
- Year 6 – Connie and Lily
Staff Lead
The St John and St James Blog Squad is a committed and creative group of Key Stage Two pupils who collaborate to produce and publish a monthly school blog. Under the guidance of Miss Bienias, the Blog Squad meets on a weekly basis to generate ideas, refine their writing skills and reflect on significant events taking place throughout the school.
Each pupil carries a personal writing journal to record observations and ideas, as they move around the school. The team engages in pupil voice activities during break times, captures photographs during awareness days, and conducts interviews with staff to gather insights into projects, initiatives, and events. These contributions form the foundation of their monthly blog post, which is designed to inform and engage the wider school community.
The blog provides a thoughtful and insightful perspective on school life, covering a wide range of topics including classroom learning, educational visits, whole-school events, sports fixtures, and pupil achievements. Authored entirely by pupils, the blog not only celebrates the life of the school but also fosters the development of essential skills such as communication, collaboration, and digital literacy.
We encourage all members of our community to visit the school website regularly to read the latest edition and stay informed about the exciting school life at St John and St James Primary School.
What have the Blog Squad been up to?
The Autumn term was a very exciting time for Blog Squad! We set up our blog, exploring the intricacies of how formatting and publishing blog posts work. We are using the platform ‘Webador’, a particularly user-friendly blogging software which is accessible for our children. Nevertheless, this still took a bit of time and hard work to get the hang of! We needed to understand how to set up a post, refine our typing skills to ensure we could include the correct punctuation within our work, and even learn how to insert images to complement our blog.
Some of our posts include Meet the Blog Squad, Black History Month at SJSJ and The Meaning of Christmas. Each post takes two full weeks to complete- our first session comprises of planning and draft writing our post with our year group partner, whilst in our second session we finish our post and proof-read for any errors.
In the Spring Term, we will continue writing about key events within the school, including why and how we are raising money for solar panels (linking with Green Team), book recommendations from our Reading Champions, World Book Day and The Meaning of Easter. Blog Squad are always looking for ideas for posts, so feel free to visit our blog and leave a comment. What would YOU like to see on our blog? Our aim is for our blog to be BY the children, FOR the community.
Follow the link below to see what we have done.
To view past editions of our blog, please click on the links below: