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Fascinating!

Content Literacy Strategies: History/Social Science Here are descriptions of over 30 strategies and activities that may be used to teach the Historical and Social Science Analysis Skills from the History-Social Science Content Standards through children's literature. They were developed to support the Pages of the Past and Tales of Time literature lists. A really great site, and another one that I will keep and use on an assignment.

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Strategies for Reading Comprehension for social studies, but you could use it for a variety of content areas. A very nice site, and you can actually dowload forms and it gives you instructions on how to use the forms. For me this will be a keeper site.

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Teaching spelling and vocabulary is easy with VocabularySpellingCity! Students can study and learn their word lists using vocabulary and spelling learning activities and games. Students can take final or practice spelling and vocabulary tests right on this engaging site. Premium games and automated student record keeping are available to Premium Members. I really like this because my 3rd grade daughter will write out words and help my first grade son with his spelling words. A great site to help kids spell

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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.

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.

I really enjoyed this book, and it gave me great insights into how students are wired. How do they take in information and how do students use that information. There are four styles of students. The book goes into different ways of working with students and talks about how students concentrate, remember, and understand information. I liked the book because it provided useful information and tips on how to interact with students. I realize that learning styles have gotten a bad rap by some educators. Now having said that learning styles do present an interesting piece of the puzzle to how students learn. It is important to note that a learning style is a preference rather than an ability to learn. Individuals have a tendency to like information or processing to be done a certain way because there is a familiarity and comfort level. The awareness of a learning style can assist educators in setting students up for success by phrasing information in certain ways or pointing out that this information may be more uncomfortable for individuals to learn because of the way it is presented. The book is organized by learning style category and then by subject areas like concentration, understanding and remembering. The first six chapters focus on learning styles, and the remaining six chapters delve into specific topic areas as each relates to learning styles. The main topics of the book are learning styles, and three central topic areas related to learning. The topic areas are concentration, remembering, and understanding. The overall message of the book is that every person may have a dominant learning style, however each person has a certain amount of each learning styles' characteristics. Moreover as students, parents, and teachers become aware of their learning style it is meant to help them achieve and adapt to others who are not wired that way, not to be used as an excuse for poor performance or I can not do something.

You raise some important points, LeAnn. I think also it is important to help students (and ourselves?) learn to tap into other styles to further develop them.

This blog is run by two Engilsh teachers and is a great resource for teachers because it focuses on what teachers want to know about a book: who will want to read it and how it could be used in a classroom. For example, the teachers talk about "A Wrinkle in Time" because of its 50th anniversary edition.

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The National Archives Digital Classroom: Primary Sources, Activities and Training for Educators and Students. This site is very helpful for social studies teachers, however the part that I think would be helpful for teachers of most subjects is the worksheet analysis documents. The documents help students analyze documents, cartoons, films, etc. I thought it was a great way to assist students in interpreting and helping them understand different documents that they will encounter in various courses.

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