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"1.Charlotte's Web by E. B. White My son's school year started off with the wonderful classic Charlotte's Web. In an era where school's budgets are being slashed and creative arts are first to land on the chopping block, it's nice to see that many of the books on this list have themes of a creative talent saving the day. In this case, it's Charlotte's artistry with web making as well as her knowledge of words! My son said, "Charlotte's Web is about how Fern's pig Wilbur was going to be killed but then Charlotte (the spider) met Wilbur the day before he was going to be killed and made a plan to save Wilbur. I liked the book and my favorite character was the Gander goose." (My son seems to love the minor characters as you'll notice in his reviews!) 2.Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo If you ask me what my favorite childrens' book in the entire world is, I'll always say this one. It's a perfect chapter book in my mind where whole adds up to much more than the sum of the parts. Every character is memorable with a story to tell and somehow all these stories meld together into a satisfying ending with an uplifting message. My son says, "Because of Winn Dixie was a extremely good book and when we read it, had everybody in the class wrapped inside the book. (not literally). When we watched the movie, I liked the book a lot better because I got to see my own vision of the story and my favorite character was Otis from Gertrude's Pets." 3.The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate My oldest's third grade teacher flagged me down two years ago to tell me how much she loved this chapter book. It then went on to win the Newbery. She said that what stood out for her was voice. She's right. Ivan the Gorilla's voice draws you right in. He's like an old soul that you can't help but befriend. In some ways this book reminds me of Charlotte's Web so I like the pairing so kids can compare and contrast. Both books revolve

"Figment is an online community where young adults and teens come together to create, discover, and share new reading and writing. Figment is also an innovative, exciting teaching tool, already being used in classrooms, libraries, and other educational settings around the country to inspire and engage young readers and writers. And what are Figment Groups? Figment offers two types of groups-public open groups for our general users to connect over anything from poetry writing to Bieber-mania; and private closed groups for our educator community. Private groups look very similar to the public groups, but with added benefits. You can limit membership to your class, library, or organizational community, and other Figment users can't see inside your group. Through these user-friendly, intuitive virtual writers' workshops: Students can create and revise writings in the safe space of a private group, sharing their works-in-progress, as well as commenting and reviewing, only with other members and their teacher. Teachers can post and update assignments, share links to relevant materials around the web, and monitor student writing. Using the group discussion tool, students and teachers can have class discussions, ask questions, and share outside resources. Once complete, students can publish their writings to the entire Figment community, therein taking advantage of one of the largest authentic audiences for student writing on the web."

"Curriculet's digital reading platform allows teachers to enrich reading by embedding their questions, quizzes and rich media directly into the reading. Curriculet is FREE for both teachers and students. REAL-TIME FEEDBACK Gone are the days of waiting until exam time to gauge student comprehension and identify roadblocks. With Curriculet, students encounter checkpoints at a relevant moment for learning, and are given immediate feedback on their performance. TRACK COMMON CORE No other digital reading platform gives you the power to track and measure mastery of Common Core Literacy Standards across all subjects including Science, History, and Math. Simply connect your questions to any Common Core State Literacy Standard and immediately get data each night that measures student growth and mastery over time. READ ANYTIME, ANYWHERE. Curriculet isn't tied to just one type of device. Our browser-based product allows students to start their assignment in class on a laptop, pick up right where they left off and read more on their mobile device as they ride the bus home; and, finally, finish up on the family computer."

"The basic idea is that teachers and librarians can upload and share all of their lessons by re-creating them (cutting and pasting sometimes) online and then sharing them with the public. It's a bit more time consuming than just uploading your lessons, but that allows all of the lessons to be searchable and organized. I've been using it for awhile now, and while there aren't many library lessons out there now, there are more added every day. As an added bonus, for every 50 lessons you upload and share, you can get a $10 Starbucks gift card!"

Welcome to the the Interactive Folio and Study Guide version of Romeo and Juliet created by the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. Here you'll find quite simply the most interactive and sophisticated version of Romeo and Juliet ever created: use it as a study guide and teaching tool. Read the play, read its English source texts, read critical materials on the play, explore Shakespeare's vocabulary, and experience a full range of multi-media associated with the play. Users will require a recent version of Adobe's Flash Player in order to access the Interactive Folio.

PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. PaperRater.com is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help students improve their writing.

WritingFix is a teacher resource website that contains lessons and ideas for any educator to freely use in their K-12 classrooms. * Writing Prompts: WritingFix features a variety of writing prompts, all designed to quickly get a student or a whole classroom writing in their journals or writers notebooks. Hover over "Writing Prompts" in the blue menu bar (upper left corner) to see the categories of writing prompts that we feature. * Writing Lessons inspired by Mentor Texts: WritingFix features a variety of lessons, all inspired by different mentor texts. Hover over "Mentor Text Lessons " in the blue menu bar (upper left corner) to see the categories of writing prompts that we feature. * Writing Traits: WritingFix features a variety of resources that are inspired by the six writing traits. These include posters, post-its, one-page resources, and thorough lessons. Hover over "6 Trait Materials" in the blue menu bar (upper left corner) to see the specific pages dedicated to 6-trait topics. * Writing Across the Curriculum: WritingFix challenges educators to teach writing not just during language arts and reading time, but also during science, history, math, and other blocks of classroom time. When a student can write about a topic, he/she can be pushed to show deeper thinking about the topic. Hover over "Across the Curriculum" in the blue menu bar (upper left corner) to see the variety of resources we offer for writing outside of language arts. * WritingFix Inservice Classes: At present, we only offer our classes in Northern Nevada; all of the resources we post, however, come with enough explanation so that any teacher could make sense of the tool without having to attend our face-to-face version of the class. Our Northern Nevada classes are very popular and well-reviewed by participants. Hover over "WritingFix Inservices" in the blue menu bar (upper left corner) to jump directly to any of our webpages dedicated to specific inservice workshops.

ReadWorks enables teachers to solve the reading comprehension crisis and eliminate the achievement gap in the U.S. by improving teacher effectiveness through research-based and classroom-proven instructional practices, curriculum, and open-access online technology. ReadWorks is delivered directly to teachers online, at no cost to educators or their schools. By engaging teachers and principals directly, ReadWorks circumnavigates systemic barriers to scalable, sustainable improvement in teacher effectiveness and student achievement.

TeachingBooks.net is an easy-to-use website that adds a multimedia dimension to the reading experiences of children's and young adult books. Our online database is developed and maintained to include thousands of resources about fiction and nonfiction books used in the K-12 environment, with every resource selected to encourage the integration of multimedia author and book materials into reading and library activities.

"Progressive Phonics is an all-in-one reading program that is easy, fun, and totally FREE---that's right, totally and completely free! And with Progressive Phonics, ANYONE can teach a child to read and write in just a few minutes a day, which makes it ideal for parents, teachers, tutors, volunteers and home-schoolers."

SpineOut is a new exciting online magazine for Young Adults, brought to you by the Good Reading team. It's a special place for Young Adults (YA's) to express their ideas and thoughts and to share their creativity in words, art, film or music. Schools and colleges subscribe to SpineOut on behalf of their students, providing access from school or home. Students are encouraged to be part of this new fun online resource by submitting reviews of newly published YA books that we provide, book trailers, poems, short stories, music lyrics, videos and art work. It is our aim that our Young Adults take this magazine on as their own, feeling free to express themselves in whichever form they wish, and then to experience the thrill of being published.

"Upgrade the typical book report with a digital spin! Integrate reading, writing, and 21st century literacy skills into an interactive and engaging project. Participating teachers will be helping students meet the demands of the Common Core, which include requirements for students to present ideas with "multimedia components (e.g., graphics, sound) and visual displays in presentations when appropriate to enhance the development of main ideas or themes." Teachers will utilize best practices and classroom management strategies for development of multimedia projects. Possible tools to use include Movie Maker, iMovie, Garage Band and Photo Story. Teachers are encouraged to utilize copyright friendly websites to create these stories."

"BookLeveler helps educators, parents, and librarians quickly and easily find appropriately leveled content for young readers. App users can scan the ISBN barcode of a book or search for content by title and/or author to appropriately level and store that content based on their in-classroom experience. "

Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. You can: * Download the files to your Mp3 player and listen on the go, * Listen to the Mp3 files on your computer, * View the text on a webpage and read along as you listen, * Print out the stories and poems to make your own book. There are six ways to get started with Lit2Go: 1. Browse by Author: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 2. Browse by Title: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 3. Browse by Reading Level (Flesch-Kincaid*): K 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 4. Browse by Subject Matter: African-American Literature, Florida, Mathematics, Science 5. Search Database. You can search the collection by title, author, or keywords. 6. Launch iTunes. If you have iTunes software installed on your computer, you can download many of the selections directly into your iTunes library. The free iTunes application for either Macintosh or Windows computers may be downloaded directly from Apple, Inc. "

"By Guy Gilchrist, Syndicated Cartoonist and Children's Book Author and Joyce Melton Pagés, Ed.D. Editor's Note: Guy Gilchrist is the author (or co-author with his brother) of the Nancy comic strip, the Muppets comic strip, and several other popular comic strips. In addition, he has written over forty children's books. In honor of National Cartoonist's Day, Guy Gilchrist has written an article to help children learn how writers get their ideas. Teachers and parents may want to share parts of Mr. Gilchrist's article with children. I have written the introduction to Mr. Gilchrist's article. I also wrote the section which follows his article about helping children find ideas to write about. -JMP"

"The following is one section of Judith Kuster's Net Connections for Communication Disorders and Sciences (www.communicationdisorders.com). The internet is FULL of materials that can be adapted to speech-language therapy. Be aware that URLs change and disappear and other sites are available and will become available. These sites are provided simply as good examples. By request, will be added for those sites added within a four-month period. The will be deleted every six months as new materials are added. The new adds are not necessarily the best adds, just the most recent."

`A wiki\ndebate visualization tool that lets you: present the strongest case on any\ndebate that matters to you; openly engage the opposing arguments; create\nand reshape debates, make new points, rate and filter the arguments;\nmonitor the evolution of debates via RSS feeds; and, share and reuse the\ndebates on and offline.`

"Our mission is to make a positive difference in the lives of Central Florida residents by providing educational resources, programs, and training opportunities through in-person presentations and the Internet. Targeting at risk children and adults, we encourage them to reach their highest potential by discovering the rewards and joy of reading. "

"Story Me is a free iPad app for turning your pictures into comic strips. Story Me provides more than a dozen layout options to which you can add pictures from your iPad's camera roll and or from your Facebook account. After importing pictures into a template you can apply cartoon effects to the pictures. To complete the creation process just tap on your imported pictures to add speech bubbles and captions. Your completed Story Me comics can be saved to your iPad's camera roll, emailed, printed, or shared on Twitter and Facebook. You do not need to create an account on Story Me in order to use it. Story Me is easy to use and because it doesn't require users to create an account it is a good choice for elementary school use. Pictures that students have taken with their iPads or found online can be good writing prompts. Importing those pictures into Story Me to create a comic strip could be a good way to get students interested in a creative writing assignment."