Website to teach you about how the food got to you! This is a really neat website for elementary teachers who discuss food production. There is a resource for teachers as well. As a farm girl, it is great to see a site that discusses the importance of farming. This is so important for kids to understand.
We garden at our school and it is great!
For those of you who teach health and wellness at the elementary level, this is a really cool website -- the "Scrub Club" teaches proper handwashing techniques. You can use hand sanitizers all you want, but the best way to prevent disease is still good old soap and water.
This is the location for getting the Mango game that Lorraine Leo recommends so highly. Mango looks like a really cool game to play on those Kindergarten smartboards.
There are a lot of free interactive reading games to use with your interactive whiteboard. Pass this along to your elementary teachers!
An article in last week's Education Week looks at the increasingly common practice of reading aloud to middle and high school students. In discussing the practice with Mary Ann Zehr (I'm quoted briefly in the piece) I made the point that while there is certainly nothing wrong with reading out loud to teenagers, it is symptomatic of what I call "literacy creep" - the tendency of elementary school-style instructional techniques to find their way deeper into K-12 education across all content areas.
Nice write up on how Brad Flickinger is running his elementary classroom with a lot of high-quality technology equipment where the students serve as mentors for each other. Love this model.
Hat tip: Robert Madden
Many elementary teachers I know talk about how much they love popplet. Here's a blog post about how teachers are using Popplet to teach English in their classrooms. Lots of ideas.
Health teachers will love this site for kids. If you have a rainy day and have access to some computers, this would be a great place for activities. As we emphasize health, we should seek out engaging content in this area. This site is free. Love it.
"The multi-award winning program is focused on teaching the basics of cardiovascular health, including anatomy, nutrition, and exercise, by offering comprehensive curriculum materials to teachers and a site just for elementary school children to explore. The curriculum was developed as part of our mission to educate the public in a collaborative effort with medical professionals and certified teachers.
Project Heart is completely free to use and free of advertisements. It is also fully translated into Spanish.
So excited to announce the Every Classroom Matters online radio show (podcast) http://bit.ly/XAozCY If you go to the site on your ipad or iphone, you can click "itunes" and it will add the show to your podcast feed or you can play it. The first show I talked to Dr. Lee Graham, a cofounder of #diffimooc about MOOCs and how colleges can actually make money giving away teaching for free. What does this model look like? It was a great conversation and I"ll be sharing more about it.
Please listen and let me know what you think and if you have a suggestion for a new show, follow the link. Thanks!
Can you design a school to promote healthy eating? There are things every cafeteria can do (read to the end.) This is a big problem and something we need to address. Every school should have a fruit basket near the checkout. It is a no brainer, but do we?
"Just walk into the cafeteria and you can see this is no ordinary elementary school.
"One of the most striking differences is the openness of the eating space," said pediatrician Dr. Matthew Trowbridge, who also consulted on the project.
Students can look into the area where the food is prepared, and they can look outside to a planned school garden, where vegetables will soon be planted."
Must read article on blended learning (in particular if you're an elementary teacher or principal, you'll want to read about the "Rocketship model" of lab station rotation instead of learning centers. This was written by Michael Horn for Forbes Magazine on March 28, 2013.
Science and elementary teachers CAN'TMISS THIS. Every hour on earthday will mark another hangout by National Geographic with scientists and all kidsof amazing people. Get in on this! This is one of those things to forward!!
'This year National Geographic celebrates its 125th anniversary and a long legacy of exploration, conservation, and research. Every hour of every day, National Geographic explorers take to land, sea, and sky (each frontier represented by a colored band on National Geographic's historic flag) trying to uncover, understand, or help care for the world around us.