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This website I still have from back when I was student teaching. My cooperating teacher wrote this website down on a sticky note for me and I have kept it ever since. I student taught fourth grade and have been successfully using Mandy's tips in my sixth grade reading classroom ever since. Here is a breakdown of what exactly is on this link: What Is Guided Reading? Schedule (of the guided reading) What Are the Other Kids Doing? Planning for Reading Groups Starting Guided Reading Guided Reading Activities That Teach What Does the Teacher Need for Guided Reading Lessons? Leveled Book Lists If you are new to 'guided reading' or are planning out your guided reading groups, then this is a great place to start. Her schedule is broken down for an elementary classroom but I have adjusted her schedule and tweaked it to fit my 50 minute blocks of students. Works well-depending on the grade and the reading level of your students.

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This news story seemed particularly important to me because it can seriously affect students relationship towards their education. Many states are thinking of holding back third graders that are not reading at grade level, and giving them more time to catch up with their peer. The article brought up studies of students that are held back having lower self esteem and are socially stigmatized. On the other side of this issue, many students in Florida that have been held back have shown enormous gains once tested in the fourth grade. The strongest point that I saw made in the story was that students who are held back for another year are costing the state an extra 10,000 dollars, so why is can't this be spend on reading programs that may give them the more individualized attention they might need in the future, and let them go ahead to the fourth grade with their peers?

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This is a great website for students and teachers of any grade level. It's great for students in a jam and needing help or a more permanent system for helping students progress in multiple areas. Topics include math, science, humanities, finance, and economics ranging from basic to highly complex lessons. Students can track their individual progress; parents and teachers can target and monitor the progress of their children/students. It's free, easily accessible and a great tool for learning. Take a minute if you don't know about this website, it's really quite amazing.

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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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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.

Always great to have resources for bringing more literacy & literature to the other core subjects!

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.

Resources for K-12 science lessons!  This is awesome and has everything from The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Animal Farm reading with science. 

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.

"The Teaching for Learning Framework, a project of the Michigan Department of Education - Office of Education Improvement and Innovation, was created to support effective instruction in challenging content across all grade levels and content areas. The Framework outlines 77 research-based Essential Skills (organized into __ Fundamental Processes and three Core Elements) that can be learned, practiced, and utilized by classroom teachers to efficiently and effectively deliver instruction."

This is the cutest website ever! If I taught elementary school, I would use this starfall website. There are different links from the main page that will help guide a young students learning. I looked at the first topic which was about teaching the sounds of the alphabet to students. I loved all the graphics and how the announcer sounded out each letter clearly. Very great tool. Check it out!!!! Starfall.com opened in September of 2002 as a free public service to teach children to read with phonics. Our systematic phonics approach, in conjunction with phonemic awareness practice, is perfect for preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, special education, homeschool, and English language development (ELD, ELL, ESL).

This past week I watched my three year old nephew Brady. We tried out the Starfall website together, and Brady loved it. He knows most of his letters in the alphabet, but he really enjoyed the picutres that came after each letter. Great website and it was wonderful to see Brady so excited to interact with the picutres.

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Sixth-grade language arts teacher Donalyn Miller joins other teachers and education bloggers who are including reading goals and challenges as part of their New Year's resolutions. Miller, who asks her students to reflect on the reading they did last year, encourages educators to participate and share goals of their own and their students for reading in 2012.

As reading teachers (and every teacher is a teacher of reading!) it is important for us to think about, and let students see, ourselves as readers. What are your personal reading goals?

I just wanted to mention that I read the Book Whisperer and loved it! I also had the opportunity (along with Elvisa) to listen to Donalyn Miller speak at the MRA conference last year in Grand Rapids. She is inspiring! I hope to read 2 books during Mid-Winter break AND Spring break. It is hard to read for pleasure with work, college and the other endless commitments!

Barrett-Mynes, J., Moran, M. J., & Tegano, D. (2010). Supporting struggling readers using interactive read-alouds and graphic organizers. Voices of Practitioners, 5(2), 1-12. This article discusses a four week study that was done in order to determine the effects that collaborative discussion and child-created graphic organizers used during read-alouds had on children's comprehension. Over the course of the study it was found that: 1. The children need less guidance from their teacher and became more collaborative with their peers in their discussions. 2. The use of graphic organizers became more child-created and required less teacher guidance. 3. Students in the study received higher scores on standardized tests. The article concludes that both collaborative discussions and child-created graphic organizers enable students to construct new knowledge and begin to organize their thinking in response to the comprehension of text. It was also found that by depending less on the the teacher for guidance, children were able to take more control and ownership of their learning. When I taught first and second grade, I loved using graphic organizers and read-alouds to help build reading and comprehension skills. I liked the fact that graphic organizers can be as creative and/or as structured as you would like. The most important factor for me is that graphic organizers can be used with any subject to help a child organizer their learning in a way that is helpful for them as learners.

I agree, it seems like the student's in the study would have had to have some prior experience with graphic organizers to be able to create their own. I loved using graphic organizers in my classroom, although with 1st and 2nd graders they were primarily teacher guided, I think that they were helpful for students to organizer their thoughts and be able to have a visual representation.

In first/second grade it is absolutely appropriate for the teacher to guide and scaffold the student use of graphic organizers.

This article gives excellent advise on how to step-by-step teach non-fiction writing to ELLs. It gives tips on do's and don't's and reasons why things work and don't work when teaching students new to the country that are especially helpful for grades 3 and up. I believe strongly that reading and writing need to be linked to have meaning for students. As we teach reading in our content areas, we also need to teach writing skills to go with those reading skills.

The article says that most ELL students who had schooling in their former country will try to write in their own language and then translate into English and this becomes problematic, because the formats of sentence structure do not match in most languages. I don't really have this problem, but understand how this could become a problem. I do have the problem of sentence structure with the way my students speak, therefore when they write, the sentence structure is not proper. The article gives a step-by-step guide starting with organizers to teach non-fiction writing. I really liked the fact that it said to use sentences in the organizers. I have been using organizers with my class and trying to teach them to write fragments and then write the sentences later and found that problematic. I thought that I was trying to teach them to get their ideas on paper quicker, but after reading the article believe that it would be easier to teach them to write the proper sentence in the organizer and then transfer it to paper.

I do love it when I find something that contradicts what I've previously done or known. Gives me pause to think. It will be interesting to see if this change in your thinking produces results in your students' writing. Keep us posted!