Group items tagged

"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

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.

"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."

"The Book Wizard Mobile application (School Edition) is a mobile extension of the Book Wizard which provides easy access to Scholastic's comprehensive database of information on more than 50,000 children's books. Hundreds of thousands of teachers already use Book Wizard online at Scholastic.com. Book Wizard Mobile will save you even more time. Teachers can search for a book or use the built-in bar-code scanner to instantly view the book's: Cover Image Title Author Interest level Reading Level by: - Grade Level Equivalent - Lexile Measure - Guided Reading Level - DRA Teachers can also: * Create and save book lists to your existing Scholastic.com account * Modify existing book lists associated with your account "

"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."

"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."

VocabularySpellingCity.com is dedicated to helping students, teachers, parent-teachers, and school systems. VocabularySpellingCity is an award-winning site with ongoing introduction of new features, many based on input from existing users. Our mission: efficient game-based study of literacy skills using any word list.

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.

"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."

teacher, librarian, chess instructor, author, storyteller, expert on boys and reading.

"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!"

"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"

These apps work for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. "As many students are ending the school year, a lot of teachers are assigning review units or lessons that capture all that they have learned throughout this past year. A top item on that review list is often vocabulary. Reviewing terms that you have learned or come across can be a very useful task. These words will often appear again in books, lessons and life in general! Also, they are a great test prep item! The iPad has many valuable free vocabulary apps available. Here are just a few of those for you to use!"