Group items tagged

Kids' Letters to President Obama Would you like to see your letter to President Barack Obama published in a book? If you are between the ages of 5 and 15, you can write a letter to President Obama that will be published in a book by Random House. The book is Kids' Letters to President Obama, edited by Bill Adler.

A letter which attempts to persuade the reader to write their own persuasive letter, and which highlights some of the main points to include.

Welcome to the Letters to Santa Project!  This was the very first project conducted in 1985 on our pioneering FrEdMail Network (using Apple IIe and 300 baud modems). It continues to be an annual Global Schoolhouse favorite. Around the world, Santa Claus plays an important role in a multitude of cultures. In the United States, he has become a true American folk icon. When you register for this project, we match you up with a partner classroom with which your students exchange their "Santa Letters:" Younger students write letters "to" Santa; Older students impersonate Santa and send their carefully crafted replies.

The Letter Generator is an interactive tool that invites students to learn the parts of a business or friendly letter and then compose and print letters.

The students read what is supposed to be typed on each page of the website. A step by step description of the parts of the letter is very nicely organized. It includes the heading, salutation, body, closing, signature and postscript. All are needed to finish the letter. The student can then choose the border and have the option of emailing, printing or saving their letters.

"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

Take time to teach children to write thank you letters. Here are some ideas.

Awesome Web 2.0 tool that allows you to create content in a video form to share with others

communicate something online by recording a sketch, optionally with your voice speaking. Any sketch can then be embedded on your blog/ homepage for people to play-back, and you can also point people to your sketchcast channel here (or let them subscribe to your sketchcast RSS feed). Create a tutorial explaining how boomerangs work (and why they don't always return). Draw a doodle of your ex. Explain a math formula. Create a cartoon (you can use the eraser tool to make place for several panels of the cartoon). Get a partner and explain a concept together... voice recording doesn't have to be used by only one person! Write a love letter with lots of sketching inbetween. Create an online Chinese course and explain Pinyin writing. Create a masterpiece and show others how to draw. Explain baseball to Europeans... or explain soccer to Americans! Create a riddle for kids: draw something and the kid has to guess while you're drawing. Draw a manga action scene. Or many other drawing ideas.

Joy Resmovits Aug. 5, 2011 ""We have become increasingly concerned with the proposed contract," Michael Mulgrew and Richard Iannuzzi, who respectively head New York City's and the state's teachers' unions, wrote in the note. The letter is addressed to New York State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, state Commissioner of Education John King, Jr., and copied to State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli. "It is especially troubling that Wireless Generation will be tasked with creating a centralized student database for personal information even as its parent company, News Corporation, stands accused of engaging in illegal news gathering tactics, including the hacking of private voicemail accounts," the letter reads. Murdoch acquired 90 percent of Wireless Generation for about $360 million last November. At the time of the acquisition, Murdoch said he saw K-12 education as a "$500 billion sector." Murdoch's first general move in the education sector had come just a few weeks earlier, when he tapped Joel Klein, then the chancellor of New York City's schools, to lead his education ventures. The Wireless Generation contracts were approved while Klein still ran the district, leading to speculation about the chancellor's intentions."

Write a online letter to santa. Fill in the boxes to make the message. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Winter+%26+Christmas

In this online tool, students can learn about and write acrostic poems. An acrostic poem uses the letters in a word to begin each line of the poem. All lines of the poem relate to or describe the main topic word. As part of the online tool, students brainstorm words to help write their poems and can save their work-in-progress to revise and edit, reinforcing elements of the writing process. Students can also print their finished acrostic poems or proudly show off their work by e-mailing it to a friend.

Students can make acrostic poems using this tool. They will brainstorm ideas on screen to come up with the ideas

I've uploaded the portfolio assignment that I use for my one semester 8th grade keyboarding class. It includes movie making, self creation of rubrics, MLA paper writing, memos, block letters, blogging, and an efolio component along with QR Codes. I wanted to share this but also was testing the functionality of the site for sharing resources. Hope you'll share. (Note: KS3 in the UK means grades 7-9 - the site will be adding US grade levels soon.)

If you're using mindmapping and brainstorming in the classroom, this list from Mashable is updated and useful. There are a lot of new tools out (many of them paid but some not.) If your students are writing collaboratively, you should have them brainstorming collaboratively before they ever type the first letter of the paper or website.

"In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates."

Vocabulary game. Given the first letter and a definition, write the correct word. good for Middle and High School ages

Simple but great ideas for teaching naming, letters and rhyming.

Topoi Flakes as provided by USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences.