French Preschoolers Post Messages to Twitter

French preschoolers near Bordeaux are posting daily updates to the micro-blogging website Twitter, despite not yet knowing how to read or write.

Since the start of the school year, the 29 schoolchildren have posted short messages of 140 characters or less about a daily activity to their joint Twitter feed, which has 89 followers, most of them parents.

"We gathered snow to see how it turns into water," reads one tweetfrom the five-year-old students of the Albert-Camus kindergarten in Talence, a commune in southwestern France.

Another tweet references the cake they baked -- the "galette des rois," or king's cake, which is traditionally made around the January Epiphany holiday in France.

The children's teacher came up with the idea as a way to teach them to recognize the alphabet in different formats -- cursive, keyboard, screen -- and to learn to move from the oral to written word.

Each day the process is the same: the children propose topics, discuss them under the teacher's guidance and vote on a winner.

All pupils then try their hand at writing a tweet, before the teacher combines them into a final post that two students type into the computer.

"We love writing on the computer like grown-ups," said five-year-old Emma.

The teacher said that the goal was not just to teach the children but to educate the parents as well.

Around 80 percent of the parents have agreed to follow the class Twitter account, where at the start of the year only one had subscribed to the service and only a handful had Facebook profiles.