This site offers a variety of books to use in science. It also includes books for math and social studies. I enjoy using trade books in my classroom for all grades. My fourth graders love when I read picture story books to them in any subject. This site is a great way to find books that will fit the needs of concepts you are teaching.
This is a great resource for picture story books that can be integrated into math. This site primarily lists books for lower el. There are books that can teach money, counting, graphing, and measurement just to name a few.
This site contains lessons and techniques to use in grades 5-8. It provides you with ideas how to help students improve reading skills. Although strategies are targets to one content area most of them can be used in several. This site gives a lot of the same strategies that were given in chapter 5 of our textbook.
By Cathy Puett Miller Of the five key reading components identified as essential by the National Reading Panel, fluency is the stepchild. It certainly gets less attention than the others, perhaps, in part, because its exact meaning often is cloudy. Many educators seem even less certain about how to teach it effectively. This article provides a three step approach and some tips on how to increase fluency. It's a short read with some great ideas... I hope you enjoy it!
Fluency has recently come more to the forefront. Some say it's a good proxy for comprehension, which makes sense, because if you are spending all or most of your brain power just figuring out what the text says, there isn't much left to figure out what it means. +2
Carol Porter-O'Donnell wrote this great article that helps students use the technique of annotating to help students improve reading comprehension. Before reading this article, I was pretty unfamiliar with what annotating is. This article is well written and gives excellent strategies that will help your students increase comprehension. I highly recommend reading this article if you have time.
Very often students, and even some adults don't understand the what is in the food they are putting in their bodies. This site gives an explanation of what a nutrition label is, along with have an interactive nutrition label. The interactive label gives you the ability to scroll over various macromolecules that are on a label and gives you an explanation of what they are and how much of these you need. This would be a good site to incorporate into a lesson on nutrition. I am actually starting one this week, so I am planning on using this site.
This article gives a listing of authors and books that would be of interest to someone who wants to learn more about science. It also gives a breakdown of what their books are about. This information is interesting to me because I am a science teacher. Not all students want to learn more about science, but I have had some students ask for recommendations for books they could read. I really like that I now have the ability to do so. I can already think of a few students who I know would like to read several of these books.
This article is all about how the diet of a student impacts their ability to learn. It is a very interesting article. Many people don't understand what kind of an impact nutrition has on learning. This article explains some of the ways that diet impacts learning and ways to make corrections to students' diets to improve performance. This is an article that is just good to read for general knowledge. I would love for many parents to read this article knowing what some of my students are ingesting on a daily basis.
With classrooms becoming more and more mainstreamed I thought that this article/website would help general education teacher understand how to create a Behavior Intervention Plan. This text focuses more on kids with autism which I found to be important because of the increased awareness of students with this disability. Student with autism can be a challenge for any teacher to teach. The skills that they usually can be taught are social, daily living, and task skills. One way to help in assisting teachers and the students in doing this is creating behavior intervention plans. With autistic students we need to use special strategies to teach them these skills and the behavior intervention plans provide that strategy. There are several steps that go into the behavior intervention plans that ensure that the students get the most out of the plan. First the teacher will need to record the student's behavior. The behaviors the teacher is looking for are problem behaviors like biting and throwing objects and skill behaviors like language or social skills. Also the teacher will need to record the frequency, duration, and time of these behaviors. Next would be an ABC analysis of the student. The A part means antecedent, what happened before the behavior. The B part would require an analysis of the behavior itself. The C part would be the consequence of the behaviors or what happened after. Following this be choosing a target for the student or goal such as choosing 1-2 skill behaviors and 1 problem behavior to work on. The last few steps include choosing a Right Intervention Strategy for the student with autism. This could include choosing reinforcement such as sensory time, making a structured schedule, and consistent intervention to any issues. In the end you should always continue to analyze the behavior intervention plan.
This article that I found I thought was very useful with new teachers developing classroom rules and procedures. Without the proper classroom routines and procedures in place a teachers classroom can be much different than they would want it to be. Noise levels, classroom wandering, and time being wasted can all occur. These things can be fixed but not by just announcing that no talking, staying in your seat, and staying on task are to be expected. These must be taught. The use of visual cues such as stop and start hand gestures as well as a gesture to say stop and start over if the procedure was not done correctly. By practicing the routine to mastery, students become aware that you are trying convey that this practice is important to their behavior. Establishing high standards is easier than having low standards. To show this, one must realize that reinforcement for bad behavior must come from the peer group. Research has reportedly shown that effective teachers show that they use the first few weeks of school teaching classroom rules. This is being proactive in your classroom.
This website text is about teachers learning to motivating students during this new era of standards. Student's psychological needs are some of the most important aspects of education. We want to understand why some students come to school prepared to learn while others are not. Why are our dropout rates at the rate they are? With standards on the rise and all of the other factors associated with a student's education coming into play we can be leaving our students at a great risk. Knowing what their needs are can help ease this risk. With this knowing how to motivate students, their need for competence, need for belonging, need for feelings of usefulness, satisfying the need to build optimism, and need for feeling potency can help not only students but schools overall. They are all part of the CBUPO Theory. This is not easy to achieve but it is possible.
This article is about teacher-student relationships. The student-teacher relationship is one of the most important factors of teaching that can be neglected. The article found that enhancing teacher-student relationships is necessary to raising student achievement because that achievement is linked to adolescent's need of having secure attachments. This is like students attachments to parents, but only with teachers. Thus research has shown that students with secure attachments do better in school. It also offers some ways in which teachers can improve teacher-student relations. Some of these methods include having an increased sensitivity and have positive interactions with students, to be well-prepared for class and hold high expectations for students, be responsive to students and provide choices whenever possible, and help students be kind, helpful and accepting of one another. By understanding the roles in which teachers have in their relationships with students will help educators become more effective.
This article is about teachers developing positive peer relationships in the classroom. Peer relationships and the experiences associated with them are an important aspect of the development of a children and adolescents. These experiences happen on different levels that include general interactions with peers, friendships, and in groups. With friendship it can serve the function of providing self worth, affection, building of relationships. Having supports help with personal problems, parents, being active. Peer groups are intimate groups of peers who interact regularly. Many peers groups according to research have shown to have similar GPA's, college aspirations, time spent on homework, and general engagement in school. Sociometric status is unique because it concerns overall peer acceptance. So if a child or adolescent is popular, average, neglected, rejected, and controversial has a major effect on one's peer relationships. All of these levels one's peer relationships such as the ways they develop, the experiences that come from them, and the types of pressures associated with them.
This is a rubric on the T4 strategy. It discusses what T4 is, how to use it as an assessment tool, what concepts teachers' should model, and gives a rubric for assessing the strategy. Very helpful if you are interested in teaching your students this strategy.
By: Richard Allington (2002) This article by Richard Allington provides a clear-eyed view of what he believes matters most in teaching kids to read - effective and expert teachers. It seems that, finally, those who make educational policy - at the local, state, and federal levels - have begun to recognize just how much good teachers matter.
I found this article interesting. A few things were new to me, but never am against being reminded of "best practices" and things we know make good teachers, but tend to forget in our busy lives.
I found this really cool website from the University of Michigan that provides apps that help students who struggle with reading and writing. Apps like this are great because they are interactive and fun. Some of the apps are free on this website and some of them cost money. I think these apps would be a great way to supplement a lesson. With the majority of students having smart phones now, having your students work on this in class once in a while would be a fun lesson too.
In the last two months, I've had to go to one IEP meeting and one 504 plan meeting for two of my students. In these meetings, we discussed reading strategies to help these students be successful in my class. Even though I teach math, reading the questions for quizzes and tests is challenging for some of my students. I've been looking online for tips on how to write my tests so my students with learning disabilities will do better. I came across this website that gives tips on helping students with disabilities become better readers. Once I find a website or article that talks about accommodating tests for low level readers I will post that as well.