Reading is Great!

Here are some great reading resources. These resources can be a great resource to share with parents also.

Remember Reading is Fundamental? The website reads books to students. There are reading logs, activities, games, and lesson plans. Parents will have to help students under 13 to join the RIF club.

We Give Books is a resource that teachers can use to read books on IWB (interactive white boards). Teachers will have to join (it is free) in order to read all the books. Here are some activities that go with this web site: http://www.wegivebooks.org/resources.The activity that I liked the best is an Information Text Scavenger Hunt.

Two websites you might be interested in looking at are ReadWorksand LearnZillion. These websites are correlated to common core. Teachers will have to register for both of these, but they are free. Find reading passages for the holidays this month: Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving.

My very favorite online reading resource is Mrs. P Magic Library. When you first click on a story to have read to you, Mrs. P introduces the story and then makes a connection to it. I love listening to the way she reads the stories.

There are many more online reading resources that are free for teachers and students.

image created in Wordle 

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What is Going on with Weather?

The weather has been quite a popular topic on the news recently!

And I think it is one of the topics coming soon on some pacing guides …

In attempt to answer the questions my daughter has been asking as well as the ones I hear students ask at school, I decided to search around and see what I resources I could find!

When I first did a search for weather, air pressure, predictions, and weather instruments, I was a bit overwhelmed by the results that came back …

As I looked closer at the results, I saw that many of them were not exactly things I would want to share with my daughter or students in the classroom …

Here are a few of the ones that met my standards for sharing:

General

• What is the weather? Dress the bear activity  

• Weather Whiz Kids  

• Sid the Science Kid from PBS.org 

• Franklin Institute Educational Hotlists  

• Weather Whiz Kids 

• Wild Weather Adventure from NASA

Weather Instruments/Measuring Weather

• Air Pressure and Wind from the Weather Dude (there is written information, you can hear a clip of the song, and see the lyrics to the song to help explain high and how pressure)

• Winds from WeatherWhizKids (prevailing, westerlies, easterlies, jet stream, global pattern …)

• Weather Instruments from Weather Whiz Kids 

• Weather Instruments Slideshow from StudyJams 

• Measuring Weather with Tools from National Geographic Education 

• Weather Instruments Video from youtube 

Clouds

• Cloud Types from NASA (also look at some of the related resources on this page)

• Cloud Types from Windows to the Universe 

• Science up Close: Clouds from Harcourt (interactive)

• Cloud Images from National Geographic Kids 

Weather Forecasts

• Predicting the Weather from EdHeads.org 

• Weather Forecasting from WeatherWhizKids 

• Tips for Predicting from WebWeather for Kids 

• Weather Forecasting from The Weather Channel Kids!

• Forecasting Under Pressure from Tree House Weather Kids 

Do you have some other great resources I can add to my list?

Please let me know!

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What Are You Doing This Month?

What is your favorite type of book?

I am a big fan of picture books for children or all ages (even adults)!

According to the School Library Journal, a group of authors and illustrators banded together to declare November 2011 as the first Picture Book Month:

Picture Book Month is an international initiative to encourage and celebrate literacy with picture books, says founder Dianne de Las Casas, an author and storyteller, who along with authors/illustrators Katie Davis, Elizabeth O. Dulemba, Wendy Martin, and author Tara Lazar have joined forces to spread the word that picture books are alive and well, especially in this digital age where an unprecedented amount of picture books have been made into ebooks and are on ereading devices such as the iPad, the Nook, and the Kindle.

Since it is Picture Book Month again in 2012:

• I could make an extra long list of my favorite picture book and/or authors of picture book.
• I could develop a list of reasons for teachers to read picture books with their students.
• I could look through my writing resources and provide a list of picture books to use to highlight certain writing skills for students.
• I could approach this from an art perspective to describe the importance of the pictures in picture books.

Look at all these resources (all the sites listed are content partners of Thinkfinity):

Wonderopolis

• #254 Why don’t all books have pictures?
• #340 How many different ways can you read?
• #376 Where is the Hundred Acre Wood?
• #226 How can you become a better reader?
• #210 Who was Mother Goose?
• #150 Who was Theodore Geisel?

ReadWriteThink (I was surprised how many resources I found for middle and high school)

• The Children’s Picture Book Project
• Picture Books as Framing Texts: Research Paper Strategies for Struggling Writers
• Using Picture Books to Explore Identity, Stereotyping, and Discrimination
• Creative Writing Through Wordless Picture Books
• Inclusive Stories: Teaching About Disabilities With Picture Books
• Using Picture Books to Teach Setting Development in Writing Workshop
• Using Children’s Literature to Spark Learning
• Postmodern Picture Books in Middle School
• Females in the Spotlight: Strong Characters in Picture Books
• Comparing and Contrasting: Picturing an Organizational Pattern Using Picture Books as Mentor Texts
• Preparing for the Journey: An Introduction to the Hero Myth Using Picture Books

ArtsEdge 

• Set a Poem to Music:  After exploring a “singable” picture book as a class, each student examines a personally selected poem for rhythm to determine its musical meter. Using previous musical skills, students set the poem to music. As a final reflection, they create a two-page spread of a picture book that contains their “singable” poem.
• Map it Out:  Explore how illustrations contribute to the telling of a story by creating illustrations to accompany text, and then creating text to accompany illustrations. Students will explore picture books (without words) and discuss the specific elements of the illustrations that “tell” the story. They will learn to “read” illustrations as they look at the ways in which pictures reveal information about the characters, setting, and plot of a story.
• Animal Habitats: Pre-readers are introduced to animal habitats through story, song, and dramatic play using children’s picture books. Students use chronological ordering and phonics to reinforce beginning literacy skills. Students explore a non-traditional method of book illustration and create their own story page

Let’s Celebrate Picture Books this month and all year long!!

What are things you can do to celebrate Picture Book Month?

*I created the word cloud by copying and pasting a list of picture book titles using Wordle.net (I used a tilde ~ between words to keep the words in the titles together)

*Title Image created using LetteringDelights.com

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Top 10 Sites Found in One Day!!!!

WSFCS Teachers can access netTrekker through Learning Village

Since I normally share sites related to Writing, Reading, and Creativity ….

I thought I might branch out a bit and share some Science sites that I thought were interesting:

• Wonderville 
• National Geographic Education
• Shape It Up!
• The Space Place
• GRIN
• EngagingScience
• Animated Science Storybooks
• Using Scrapbooks in Science
• Peep and the Big Wide World
• Exploratorium: Return to Mars

What is even better is that I found all 10 of these sites in one day ….

I saved time searching for resources by using netTrekker ….

Using netTrekker Search, I did searches for simple science topics (ex. rocks and electricity) and was able to get results from many places. I also looked at the related subjects when viewing the results, so I was able to find a variety of resources!

I could limit my search by grade level, subject, and even type of resource …

And the best part is that all of the resources and sites accessed through netTrekker have been through a teacher review process …. which helps students when they do research as well …

photo credit: placbo via photopin cc

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Making the Elections Relevant

As this year's Elections draw closer and closer do your students really know what is going on?

With all of the ads on TV, radio and the internet it may be difficult for your students to see the big picture as you explain the election process to them.

Although this can be discussed in all grade levels it is more prevalent right now for students that are in the eighth grade. How might you ask?

Students in the eighth grade are currently learning about the Revolutionary War and the events that happened immediately afterwards. Those events helped to lead us to our first Presidential election. Again you may be asking why is this an important event in the lives of these students. The answer is simple, during the next elections cycle they will be High School Seniors and may have the opportunity to vote. So it is important for them to understand the process and how they can make a difference if they choose to vote, remembering to tell them that it is their choice.

Here are some resources that can help make the difference in how your students perceive the Elections and how they can get involved and make it relevant to their lives.

• Have your students create Political Cartoons using this Arts Edge Lesson that brings in a cross curricular component to the normal Social Studies curriculum.  As well Arts Edge has a great Lesson on the Election Process to help enhance your instruction on how the process works.
•  You can use Read Write Think as a launch point to provide a number of resources on the Election Cycle and ways to get your students involved.  Some of these resources discuss using Avatars to create political cartoon skits.
• You can use this Themed Resource page from Smithsonian's History Explorer to give your students some more background on the election process.  See how Mass Media plays a role in the election process with this resource from Smithsonian. 
• Try all of these resources that Thinkfinity has gathered together for you regarding the election process.
• Here are a lot of Election Lesson plans and activities from EDSITEment that go along with the Social Studies curriculum.

So even though I am talking to all you eighth grade teachers out there, anyone can utilize these resources to help make the elections relevant to your students by having them become involved through some of these activities.

This will help drive home the importance of the subject material and even help them to understand the current events that are going on in the world around them.


photo credit: The Suss-Man (Mike) via photopin cc

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What do you use to evaluate?

How do YOU evaluate a website?

What makes YOU feel good about the information that you get and possibly use from a website?

Do YOU just go with a gut feeling or is there more to it than that?

I got an email from a teacher a few days ago asking for some ideas and resources she could use to work with her 3rd-5th grade students on evaluating website and conducting effective research.

I had a few ideas, so I sent her some links.

Then I asked friends I am connected with on Skype and got more ideas, so I sent her another email ... and then another email ... and then another email

I started looking at some of the suggested resources, found some other resources and ideas ... so I sent her another email!

I know, I know, I know ...

I did not make very good use of email since I should have pulled together everything ... but I got excited and wanted to share with the teacher who had asked! :)

Since I like to share, I thought I would share them here too (this is also a good way for me to put them in a place where I can find them ... a little selfish)!

Research and Media Skills are such a big part of the Common Core that I thought these might be useful so here are some of the things I found:

• Digital Literacy Tour from Google
• Search Engine for Students from Sweet Search
• Resourcing the Curriculum: Evaluating Websites  (from the Department of Education)
• A Guide to Critical Thinking About What You See on the Web from ITHACA College Library
• Teaching Students to Evaluate Websites from Infosearcher
• Web Evaluation from CyberBee

I also found some questions on a Thinkfinity forum about evaluating websites. There are some great resources and ideas in the comments. Here are a few of them:

•  "One of the sites I've used with 4-6th graders is All About Explorers http://allaboutexplorers.com/  This site has several lesson ideas to help students evaluate information as different levels.
• "I've also used the "rule of 3".  I told them that they should find at least 3 other sites that support the information that they will be reporting.  We also talked about verifying a website author"
• There are some lesson plans on ReadWriteThink that take on evaluating online resources. These might be helpful, depending upon the grade level where you teach:

1. Inquiry on the Internet: Evaluating Web Pages for a Class Collection for grades 6-8
2. Research Building Blocks: Examining Electronic Sources for grades 3-8
3. Wading Through the Web: Teaching Internet Research Strategies for grades 6-8

You can find examples and non-examples, checklists, lessons, ideas, links to other sites, and many other things!

Go explore ... come back and share what you found ...

Remember that SHARING is the most important part ... even if it is not with me, but make sure to share with others!

photo credit: Britta Bohlinger via photopin cc

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More Election Connections!

This morning Melissa wrote a blog post about Let's help students make connections with elections! This reminded me of some more election resources, but through Edmodo. When you are in Edmodo, there are several election communities that you can follow. (Remember you can follow any of these publisher communities in Edmodo by click on the Browse button next to the word Community). In these communities, you can connect with other teachers teaching about the election or find resources on the election. Here are a couple of communities that you might be interested in.

photo credit: Vaguely Artistic via photopin cc

Bill of Rights Institute: There is a video on the history of voting, and teaching with current events. You can sign up for lessons to be mailed to you on current events, voting, free press, the constitution, etc.


Election Insights: Activities for the debates, election, etc. Click on the button Collections for more resources.

iCivics: Constitution resources, branches of government resources, etc. Click on the button Collections for more resources and games.

Edmodo has some ideas for teaching the election: 3 Ways to Engage Students through Edmodo.


Image from PhotoPin: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaguelyartistic/61275039/

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Let's help students make connections with the elections!

Do you know how many days it is from today until the Presidential Election?

Do our children understand the signs, commercials and debates they are seeing and hearing?

I found something on the Library of Congress site that could help:

This image is not interactive but if you click on it, you will be taken to the interactive site where it is from!

At the site, when you hover on the words at the side, blue questions appear above the voting box (which is animated). Those can be guiding questions for the text you will access when you click on the categories.

I think a KWL or KWLH chart might work well ….

According to ReadingQuest Strategies:

What Is K-W-L?.
K-W-L is the creation of Donna Ogle and is a 3-column chart that helps capture the Before, During, and After components of reading a text selection.

K stands for Know
This is the prior knowledge activation question. 

W stands for Will or Want
What do I think I will learn about this topic?
What do I want to know about this topic?

L stands for Learned
What have I learned about this topic?

Asking questions can engage and inspire learning! It also provides direction for what you want children to learn from a resource. I have written a previous post on KWL charts and also one on FQR charts which may work even better for nonfiction … Facts, Questions, and Responses.

These nonfiction information articles provide a place for guided practice on this type of text as well as what to do when you encounter words that you do not know when you read.

Another idea is for children to create posters/signs/lists online or offline of the interesting information the discover. You could even jigsaw this site by having different groups read each section and then report back to the other about what they learned. This could be a time for students to choose how to represent the information to share it!

Here are places you can find nonfiction reading strategies and lessons that could be used with the material you find on the Library of Congress site:

• Class Tables of Non-Fiction Features and Text Structures
• Look in the Literacy Cookbook for Recipes for Effective Literacy Instruction
• Reading Nonfiction Texts Lessons from NCTE 

You never know what you might learn from reading nonfiction!

Did you know that George Washington was reluctant to become our first president?

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Using the Collective Knowledge for Benefit ...

I was scheduled to meet with elementary school teachers yesterday …

On paper, the training was supposed to be Promethean “ActivInspire Beyond the Basics” … that can mean sooooo much.  Since I did not do trainings at that school last year, I was not really sure what “beyond the basics” meant for those teachers …

But I wanted the time I spent with teachers today to be beneficial for them and guided by the questions they had …

That is where LiveBinders comes in …

(Stay with me … I will make a connection … eventually)

I knew teachers had some questions about “clickers” (expressions and votes), so I wanted to have some resources to be able to give to them. Since I did not know the exact topics that would be covered, I wanted to have more than enough resources!

I went to LiveBinders and searched for binders using the keywork Promethean or ActivInspire.  I found binders on Activexpressions, Activotes, registering, creating questions, and lots of interactive sites to be used with the ActivBoard.

I could have done a google search or even looked a few sites I have used in the past. However, I was able to use the knowledge of the collective group to my benefit.

When people create a LiveBinder, it is normally because they have found information they want to pull together and remember or share. I was able to save time and searching by looking at the binders others had searched to create!

I liked most of the resources and sites in these LiveBinders but there were a couple of resources or pages that did not really match with my focus or the direction of the school system, so if copying was enabled on the LiveBinder, I made a copy and took out the pieces I did not want to include (I made sure to still give credit to original creator).

Then I needed a way to pull together all the LiveBinders I was finding …

I could make a list on a wiki or webpage …

I could create a symbaloo …

I could make a presentation pulling them all in …

Did you know that you can put a LiveBinder inside a LiveBinder inside a LiveBinder? I could have made one LiveBinder by combining all the LiveBinders I found … (I have done that in the past).

Then I remembered something else I could do on the LiveBinders site! I made a virtual shelf to showcase the specific binders I wanted. After making that shelf, I could embed it on a webpage or put the link somewhere easy to access!

So that is what I did … I put the link to the shelf on the website of the Instructional Technology Department!

Teachers may still have to search a little to find the information they are looking for … but the searched was narrowed (and would not take as much time) since I pulled together resources in LiveBinders that others has already put together!

We had a good day of learning together … and the teachers went away with places to go find the resources we talked about as well as a direction to find even more!

The focus of today was on Promethean and not LiveBinders, but at the end of a couple of the sessions, a few teachers said they were able to see some ways LiveBinders could be used and now wanted to learn more about LiveBinders!

I never know what is going to make an impression and motivate learning …

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Hurricanes, Primary Sources, Images, and Vocabulary ...

What do you think of when you hear the word Hurricane?

Do certain names pop to mind?

Do pictures of water, flooding, and damage?

What if nothing comes to mind when you hear that word if you have never really had any experiences with one?

I grew up in NC and our Outer Banks tend to get hit hard by Hurricanes. My uncle used to be in the Coast Guard at the NC Coast. We have been on vacation at the beach when we were evacuated for a hurricane.
None of my memories compare with any of the hurricane experiences of the people in areas like Florida and Louisiana ...

On the LEARN NC site, I found a portion of the digital textbook for NC History that is related to hurricanes, flooding, and NC History:

5.3 How does a hurricane form? 

• This section is provided by NASA and contains images, defintions, and explanations. I found the differences between a tropical disturbance, tropical depression, and tropical cyclone to be quite interesting. There is even a chart that could be used as guided practice for reading a form of informational text. 

5.4 Understanding Floods

• This section is provided by NOAA and contains vocabulary for various types of floods: river flood, coastal flooding, inland flooding, and flash flood. I may need to use this to give me ideas on how to explain to my daughter the flash flood warnings we kept getting over the weekend!

5.5 Mapping Rainfall and Flooding

• In this section, you can find videos, images, charts, and graphs that would be great for learning about visual and digital literacy as well as how to interpret and analyze information presented in different formats.

5.6 The evacuation

• I think there is a great opportunity to dicuss some problem-based learning related to the largest traffic jam mentioned in this section and the lane reversal plan to help prevent that in the future. This could also be used fordiscussing the skill of cause and effect.

 5.7 Rising Waters

• At first I was not going to include this section, but this is a great example of an oral history in an interview format. You can download the recording to play but the transcript is also located below.

I now realize that I could go on and on and on ...

This digital textbook was originally written for 8th grade. I have found many ways to adjust, alter, and select parts of these primary and informational text sources to be used for many grades in many areas of the curriculum.

Asking questions, making connections, and creating comparisons are concepts that repeat throughout the Common Core Standards. Primary Source Documents come in handy in order to compare and contrast a firsthand and secondhand account of the events in history.

Think about the ways hurricane coverage, effects, and descruiction could be used for making connections as well as for comparing and contrasting ...

Think about the other sources that could be used to pull together that information ...

Think about the wide variety of research skills that could be used ...

As well as learning about perspectives and information text ....

You could also check out Wonderopolis Wonder #334 is What is a Hurricane?

photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video via photo pin cc

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Need Ideas for Ways to Use the Document Camera?

A couple of years ago, I posted a list of 10 links offering suggestions for things teachers could do usign document cameras. When I checked the links in the post recently, I found that only three of the links still worked .... yikes! So I am posting part of the post again and adding in some more current links (working ones)!

Document cameras can be used to take pictures, videos, and even as web cams. I think teachers just need more information on the many ways these tools can be used. I know they also need the time to try things out. Even though there are document cameras in many classrooms, I do think that tool has been overlooked.

Here is a list of links to a wide variety of ways document cameras can be used in the classroom:

• 101 Ways K-12 Teachers Use Document Cameras
• 100 Ways to Use Digital Cameras from Scholastic
• Ways to Use Doc Cameras with Students (from Learn 2.0)
• Document Camera Idea for Elementary, Middle, and High School Classes
• Ideas for Science, Social Studies, English, Math, Music, Art ...
• Teaching 'N Technology Document Cameras in the Classroom
• 101 Ways Kennewick Teachers Use Document Cameras
• Document Cameras Enhance Student Learning
• Doc Cameras in the Classroom Handout
• Using Document Cameras in Pre-K and K Classrooms 

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Connecting Birthday and History ...

My birthday is today!

I was looking at Thinkfinity today and noticed the Today in History area ....

I wondered what happened in history on my birthday ... so I clicked on the calendar and went to find out!

That got me thinking about research for students in a class. Each student has a birthday, right? So perhaps for one research project/writing lesson, students would need to research something that happened in history on the day he or she was born. I had grand ideas of using those projects to create a class book or using the multimedia digital projects created to form a classroom gallery. Students could have a choice as to how to share the information collected. Students could investigate the findings of other students ....

So I started playing around with that idea ...

I have a coworker (Marty) who will celebrate his birthday on August 18 ... what happened in history on that day?

I started getting more and more excited about my idea and how rubrics could be formed to assess research and the creation of the projects. I started seeing wonderful creations in my mind. I started thinking of the other dates that are significant in my life that I could look at ...

Another coworker (Dorene) will celebrate her birthday on Sept. 7, so I went looking for the even in history from that day on the Thinkifinity calendar.  I clicked forward to September and found ..... 

the calendar was blank ....

My first thought was ... oh no, another idea down the drain ...  because it won't work

My next thought was ... it may not work exactly the way I had it planned out in my head originally but it still will work in some shape ...

So I started considering alternatives ...  

• 
  each person could look at events that happened in history on the day he or she was born by looking at it that day  (but what about the kids with Summer birthdays ... my sister's is in July and mine is in August)
• students could look at the past Wonders of the day on Wonderopolis to find an event to research based on the information that was shared on their birthdays
• we could look for other resources to use to explore dates in history

That was when I remembered that the Thinkfinity calendar gives you the option to look at days, week, months, and even years. I had seen the ability to see previous ones when looking at the day, week, or month calendars .... so I wondered if I might be able to look at the calendars from previous years ...

So I decided to try!

The good news is that YOU CAN! 

So for my coworker who will celebrate her birthday on Sept. 7, I looked at the calendar from last year to see what event was shared that day!

Yay!

You may have noticed that several of my pictures include a button to click to view more. When you click on that, you are taken to a page describing the event in 2-3 paragraphs. Along with that information, you can also find links to various lessons, activities, and ideas from the Thinkfinity Content Partners that go along with that topic or could be used with that type of information!

The other ideas that I brainstormed above would work too and I predict you can come up with some even better ways to use these dates in history!

I would love to hear some other ideas, so please leave a comment and share them!

Go pick a date and explore ....

images from http://www.thinkfinity.org/today-in-history

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Back to School with Edmodo

photo credit: Avolore via photo pin cc

What do you do with last year's groups? You want to keep the group name and all the information, but you want to clean the group up to start fresh. 

Your first step would be to rename that group. For instance if you have Social Studies per 1 group, you might want to rename it SSper1. To rename a group, click on the group, then click on Group Settings and change the name. One of the reasons to rename your group is that you cannot create groups with the same name. Then after renaming the group, you should archive the group.

To archive the group, click on the group you are going to archive. On the right hand side, click on Group Settings. You will notice a button at the bottom of the box that says Archive Group. By archiving that group, no one else will be able to join the group but the teacher can access the group if it is necessary. Then the teacher can create a new group (with the original name) and all the files and links the teacher had in the original group will still be available in that group.

For more information from the Edmodo blog, click here: "Your Back to School Checklist". Make sure to read the teacher rollout resources and review the best practices. There is some great information located here.

Image from Photo Pin: http://www.flickr.com/photos/52636849@N00/204934333/

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