Introducing Students to the Online Discussion

In the days leading up to the online discussion, you should build students' excitement for the activity and prepare them to take part in it. Tell them that they're going to read a great book and talk about it with their classmates in Book Club. Each day they'll also have the chance to communicate with students in other classrooms who are reading Bridge to Terabithia. By using the Internet, they can share the best ideas that come out of their reading logs and book club discussions with their peers in other regions.

Introduce students to the Student Comment Form and the Student Comments pages, and make sure they understand how the online discussion will work. You'll want to give some advance thought to how you will integrate this online communication into your daily routine. For example, you might set aside a block of time each day when students can take turns at the computer, or you might arrange a rotating schedule so that each child gets to write in every other day.

We want to make sure that students in different classrooms interact with each other during the Bridge to Terabithia discussion. You should encourage your students to respond to other students' comments whenever possible. (They should mention the other students by name in their own messages.) Make sure that your students have the chance to read the messages posted the previous day before they send in their own comments. Teachers who have participated in past online discussions have printed and distributed the previous day's comments to their class or allowed their students to browse the comments online -- either way works fine.

If you'd like to devote some class time to a lesson on writing effective comments, see the lesson plan on Writing Good Comments for Online Discussions. This lesson plan allows students to critique comments from a past discussion and learn how to write comments that will make their own online conversations interesting and fun for everyone.