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Mrs. Meacham's website has a fantastic section on reader's workshop with units that focus on: front loading, fix-up strategies, connection, visualizing, questioning, determining importance, inferring, and synthesizing. Each unit has a link that takes you to the materials she uses while teaching each mini lesson. I especially like that you can print out all of the material and use it in your own classroom.

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This is a great website that I use often. 'Read, Write, Think' is excellent because it provides useful resources for grades k-12. This site provides teachers with classroom management resources, professional development, parent and after school resources, and learning objectives. My favorite part of this site is under the classroom resources tab they provide a plethora of lesson plans (great place to get ideas), and terrific interactive lesson plans too! I hope you enjoy because this is one of my favorites :)

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This offers everything you need to teach students feature article writing and informational reading. It even includes lesson plans.

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I found this site that has free reading worksheets and short stories that are geared towards beginning ESL students reading levels. It incorporates lifeskills lessons as wells as geography, history, holidays, and famous Americans. It seems like a great resource for social studies. I actually found a worksheet with a camping theme to use with our "Camp-Reads-A-Lot" theme day we are doing tomorrow. This particular worksheet has a paragraph, true/false questions, personal questions, and a little writing section. I also found a worksheet about the American Flag, which is great, because we are studying American symbols. This worksheet has 3 paragraphs of information about the flag, true/false questions, and a Daily Oral Language type "correct the sentence" section. These aren't something I would use in isolation, but they are a great resource for adding to and differentiating instruction.

Weekly features include Cartoons for the Classroom, Front Page Talking Points, Geography in the News Quiz, Audio Webcasts, Interactive New Quiz, Topical News Videos and Discussion Prompts, Use the News lessons, Words in the News Vocabulary Quiz.

This is such a cool way to close a lesson, a unit, or a school day!  

This site has a lot of good resources pulled together for teachers to use to find high-interest reading pieces for teaching to students such as Aesop's Fables, word-a-day, and comic strips. It seems really useful! Language Arts resources for lesson preparation, for teachers, parents, and students, Internet4Classrooms

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.

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Great interactive reading activity for a Spanish classroom! 

Wordstash is a useful tool to help students with learning vocabulary in various different subjects for school. It would be something students could use outside of school to help them review or could be incorporated into lessons. Students love being able to use technology in their learning and this is a move towards that. I really love being able to make learning more friendly for students and I believe Wordstash would be a way to accomplish this.

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"Part of the reason my students have such a hard time reading is because they bring little prior knowledge and background to the written page. They can decode the words, but the words remain meaningless without a foundation of knowledge. To help build my students' prior knowledge, I assign them an "Article of the Week" every Monday morning. By the end of the school year I want them to have read 35 to 40 articles about what is going on in the world. It is not enough to simply teach my students to recognize theme in a given novel; if my students are to become literate, they must broaden their reading experiences into real-world text." Includes links to articles used as well as articles used in previous years.

A plethora of before, during, and after reading, hands-on activities.

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.