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 

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!

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