News for tweens, kids and students

The first online book rental site with a dedicated experience for children.

(Basically, Netflix for books & kids) A little pricey, but an interesting concept.

Explore classic stories "The Wizard of Oz," "The Mermaid," and "Aladdin" and collect treasure. Great activity for using context clues. As the questions pop up, students who don't know the story can click on the link "Read the book to discover the answer" and be taken to the page in the book that contains the information they need to answer. Great for teaching students to go back to the text to find information and use context clues.

Ever heard of an Exquisite Corpse? It's not what you might think. An Exquisite Corpse is an old game in which people write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold it over to conceal part of it and pass it on to the next player to do the same. The game ends when someone finishes the story, which is then read aloud. Our "Exquisite Corpse Adventure" works this way: Jon Scieszka, the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, has written the first episode, which is "pieced together out of so many parts that it is not possible to describe them all here, so go ahead and just start reading!" He has passed it on to a cast of celebrated writers and illustrators, who must eventually bring the story to an end. Every two weeks, there will be a new episode and a new illustration. The story will conclude a year from now.

a free speed reader, using a new patent pending method that can convert text into meaningful phrases, without requiring linguistic analysis. These phrases are displayed in sequence to instantly speed your reading.

Explore the thinking strategies students need to use before, during, and after reading to improve comprehension of nonfiction selections

Use this site to create, read, and share engaging digital books that build reading skills for students. Your universally designed books will engage and support diverse learners according to their individual needs, interests, and skills.

Inspired by the Best...Creating 6 Trait Writing Lessons Inspired by Literature. For the first time, the lessons on this page were shared and workshopped with teachers from many schools. As part of the class, these participants each proposed a lesson idea based on a piece of literature or a classic poem not yet represented on this page. The thirty lessons you find posted here came from the summer workshop and our Fall inservice in 2007.

Katie, who runs the site is one of the most helpful people I know. Titkatok is constantly offering free services to help teachers use their site and make it managable in the classroom. It is one of my favorite sites to recommend to elementary teachers for writing.

This is a great site for online writing/publishing of stories. The books created here cannot be printed out, but can be shared online.

Tikatok is a site where students can create their own books complete with illustrations. They can collaborate with other students while writing and editing and published their finished books on the web as well as sharing them with others. Parents who are interested can purchased printed books.