So, what are you waiting for? Setting up a blog is really easy and is a great way to learn how to express your own opinions.
Look at the link below for step by step instructions on setting up your own blog:
https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/how-to-make-a-blog-6011811 (you might have to set up a free account on TES first).
If you are short on ideas, below is a link with helpful tips on how to create an anti-bullying blog:
https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/write-a-blog-6299649
7:00AM GMT 15 Mar 2013
When nine-year-old Martha Payne posted the first entry on her blog, NeverSeconds, last April, about what she was given to eat at school that day (a slice of pizza and a single potato croquette), she asked her father if anyone would read it. He posted and tweeted about it, and three hours later her blog had had more than 10,000 visitors. Now NeverSeconds has been read nine million times, spawned a book deal and raised almost £130,000 for Mary’s Meals (feeding schoolchildren in poor parts of the world) – and encouraged other children to turn to their computers to write.
Statistics are hard to gather – for a start parents can tick a box when they set up a child’s blog so that it doesn’t appear on Google – but in 2010 the London School of Economics found that 11 per cent of European children who used the internet wrote a blog. Joanne Mallon, who started Kids Blog Club in September, a website that acts as a hub and support centre for child bloggers (and concerned parents), thinks that numbers have increased since then. ‘Children saw reports about NeverSeconds on Newsround and realised that it was just a kid like them talking about stuff they saw every day,’ she says. Simple blogging platforms have made it easy. ‘My daughter set up her blog in half an hour when she was 10,’ Mallon says. Her daughter, Lia, now 13, and son, Isaac, nine, both have blogs – eljae.com (a joint blog with Mallon) and turtleofhappiness.wordpress.com – something that Mallon (who has herself blogged for six years) encourages.
She has taught her children about online security (neither child uses their real name, location or school); ‘I want them to also think digital footprint and what future employers might be able to find,’ she says. But Mallon believes the benefits of blogging outweigh any potential risks. ‘When a child has got a space to write whatever they like it encourages them to be more creative,’ she says. ‘My son is writing and reading more since he started his blog – and it has improved his grades at school.’
Meanwhile Martha, who took a break from blogging when the publicity got too much, is back at it. ‘Bad things can sometimes turn into good things,’ she said of the reaction her blog caused. ‘I’m glad I didn’t give up.’
Jake McGowan-Lowe, Jake’s Bones
Jake McGowan-Lowe, 11, has more than 100 skulls in his bedroom. ‘I don’t find them scary, but my mum does,’ he says, laughing. He gets up ‘at silly hours in the morning’ at weekends to go on walks with his father, Nick, near their home in Braco, Perth, and hunt for bones, all because he needs weekly fodder for his blog, Jake’s Bones.
He started the blog four years ago, aged seven. His posts take about half an hour to research – he uses websites and reference books – then one hour to write. Jake dictates to Nick (‘it’s quicker, but I’m getting faster’). The best part about it, Jake says, is that ‘I can talk to other people who love bones; people in the playground just talk about football.’ And not only amateurs – among his 77,000 visitors last year was the head of forensics at the University of Dundee, Professor Sue Black, who needed a picture of a furcula (or wishbone) as part of a 15-year-old murder investigation. She came across Jake’s website (‘I’ve got loads of them’), and after he helped her, she let him use the department’s facilities, including its tank of flesh-eating dermestid beetles that clean up bones. ‘That was cool,’ he says.
Jake has even been sent bones by well-wishers. A bald-eagle skull – now his favourite – arrived wrapped in brown paper and addressed to ‘Jake the bone man, Braco’. He was delighted. ‘It’s like talking about F1 in the playground and then suddenly Jenson Button turning up,’ he says.
Jake, who has two brothers, aged two and one, now has a book in the pipeline, to be published by TickTock (an imprint of Octopus) next spring. ‘It’s very exciting,’ he says. ‘It’s given me a lot of confidence to think that people like what I write.’ jakes-bones.com
Maelo Manning, Libdem Child
On the night of the last general election, in May 2010, Maelo Manning’s house in south London was a local campaign base for the Liberal Democrats – her mother, Jane, a civil servant, is an active party supporter. At 3.30am, caught up in the excitement, Maelo, then 10, asked her mother if she could start a political blog. ‘There were young people in the living-room, leaflets piled up in my bedroom, and it was a really exciting time to be involved in politics,’ she says. She chose the name – Libdem Child – and created a profile. Her mother put her own email as the contact, to monitor incoming mail, but Maelo has free rein to blog whenever she wants, about whatever she wants, as long as it is political or in the news. Following the rape and murder of a woman on a bus in Delhi, she organised a vigil in London in January to remember the 23-year-old victim, to which 30 people came. She blogs weekly, spending about an hour on each post.
Since starting to blog, Maelo, now 13, has spoken five times at Lib Dem party conferences on subjects such as youth clubs, gendercide, youth justice and academies. The blog is somewhere she can formulate her ideas. ‘It’s the only place I can express my views freely without someone else censoring it,’ she says.
Her blog gets between 200 and 400 hits per day. She has had negative comments from one visitor, but is sanguine about them. ‘He’s a troll, he does it to everyone,’ she says. Her friends at St Dunstan’s College, a co-educational independent school in south London, don’t read her blog (‘we don’t talk about politics; they’re more into celebrities’), but she has found friends who share her views through blogging (and Twitter). While her classmates have One Direction posters on their walls, Maelo has a framed photograph of her with the Rev Jesse Jackson.
Maelo, an only child, says her parents (her father, Roger, a recruitment manager, also supports the Lib Dems) respect her views when they talk politics. ‘But I’m not always treated like an adult,’ she says. ‘My mum doesn’t like that I recently became a vegetarian, and I can’t blog until I’ve done my homework.’ libdemchild.blogspot.com
Holly Fratter, Childtasticbooks
Photograph by Jonathon Williams
Sam Pope and her daughter, Holly Fratter, six, started their joint blog reviewing children’s books in May last year. They both write a few paragraphs on the latest book they have read, each giving their own perspective. ‘We love reading and we used to just write down what we thought, but then we thought we’d turn it into a blog,’ Holly, who lives in Oxford, explains.
Holly, an only child, writes her reviews in a notebook before typing them up (or asking Sam to do so). ‘If I’ve made mistakes we’ll go through them together,’ she says, adding that in the past year her computer confidence and typing skills have improved. They blog up to twice a week, spending about an hour on each post, and are currently getting more than 6,000 hits per month. ‘The most fun thing about blogging is that you get to put your own opinion and then other people comment on it. It’s exciting that people read my writing,’ Holly says. ‘And that we get sent loads of books by publishers.’
‘I like that Holly reads and that she thinks about what she reads,’ Pope, a freelance writer, says. ‘She’s always been good at writing stories, but now she’s good at being critical about things she reads. The blog shows her that her opinion matters. It’s also a really nice thing to do as mum and daughter.’ childtasticbooks.wordpress.com
‘Betsy Lou’, Betsy Lou Adventures
Photograph by Jonathon Williams
‘I wanted a blog because Mummy and Daddy have blogs,’ six-year-old Betsy Lou says. Last November, when she was five, she asked her mother to set up a blog for her, Betsy Lou Adventures, making her, according to Kids Blog Club, Britain’s youngest blogger. Her parents, Clare and Mark Rudd, have both written blogs for 10 years; Clare’s blog on vegetarianism gets about 10,000 hits, and Mark, who works in IT, writes about computer games.
‘Betsy Lou’ is a pseudonym (‘it’s what my daddy calls me’) designed to protect her online. ‘We want her to be aware from a young age that she has to be careful about what she writes on the internet,’ Clare says. Both Betsy Lou and her three-year-old sister are proficient on the computer – Betsy Lou writes her posts on an iPad (each one takes about an hour) then emails it to her mother to check spelling, add pictures and publish it. ‘I like seeing my writing on the computer,’ she says.
Her blog, which is a mix of pieces about her life, trips out (the Science Museum re-tweeted a recent post she made about her visit there, and it got 200 views; ‘she’s a bit obsessed with stats,’ Clare says) and her poems. She recently let a friend write a poem on her blog ‘because she wanted to write a poem like mine’. It is, Clare says, a good way of encouraging her to do extra work. ‘It gives her confidence in writing, but also improves her computer skills.’ betsylouadventures.blogspot.com
Tolmeia Gregory, Tolly Dolly Posh Fashion
Tolmeia Gregory’s fashion blog is a riot of photographs of its author dressing up in wacky outfits, tips on how to craft your own catwalk trends (a recent post was on sewing a lace collar on to an old shirt), plus her views on the fashion industry – Tolmeia is not a fan of airbrushing. She even invites readers to submit photographs of themselves, and allow 12-year-old Tolmeia to create an outfit for them.
Tolmeia, who comes from Cheltenham, but lives in France some of the time, set up her blog in April last year, with help from her sister Saskia, 24, who already had a website for her band. Her dream, she says, ‘is to be a fashion designer, which I’ve wanted to do since I was 10, and I hope my blog will help with that.’ Her love of fashion comes from her mother, Cheryl, who used to be an accessories designer for Mulberry. ‘She used to make me clothes and I read her magazines,’ Tolmeia says. She spends an hour on each post – she writes about two per day after school (‘I can go on the internet as much as I want’) – and she shows them to her mother or father before publishing.
She gets about 150-200 hits per day. Tolmeia’s hero is the American teen-blogger Tavi Gevinson, who started writing a fashion blog at the age of 12 – the success of which means that she is now a regular at New York and Paris fashion weeks and has appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for media personalities. ‘I got her book for Christmas and it’s so cool,’ Tolmeia says. ‘She was my age when she started and she’s so successful now; I hope I can do the same.’ tollydollyposhfashion.com
