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.

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 site gives instruction on how to set up a scientific paper and how to read one. Students very often don't understand how to set up a scientific paper and this gives a breakdown of exactly how to do it. It also gives instruction on how to interpret results, and how to decide if all of the criteria that need to be in a scientific paper have been met. Students very often don't understand how all of this can be accomplished. This would be of use for students who were having trouble writing a scientific paper.

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.

The book, Classroom Instruction that Works, is organized into several different sections or topics. Inside each of these there are ideas deemed important under the heading of the section. These are usually ways of accomplishing the task that is the heading for each section. For example, the heading for one of the sections is summarizing and note-taking. Inside this section there are several bolded headings that give teachers strategies to get students to take proper notes. I really liked the way the sections were set up like this. It basically gives you a step-by-step approach of how to accomplish each of the tasks that make up the headings of the different chapters. Also, each section gives ideas of what you should teach students not to do. Finally, there are figures inside of each section. These are usually examples of the strategy that was previously described in the text of the book. The figures are also sometimes research of how effective these strategies have been.

The main topics in the book are organized into twelve different sections which are as follows: Applying the Research on Instruction; Identifying Similarities and Differences; Summarizing and Notetaking; Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition; Homework and Practice; Nonlinguistic Representations; Cooperative Learning; Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback; Generating and Testing Hypothesis; Cues, Questions and Advance Organizers; Teaching Specific Types of Knowledge; Using the Nine Categories in Instructional Planning. The main idea of these sections is to give readers ideas of how to equip students with the ability to accomplish these tasks. The authors use research and experience to present different methods for ways to teach the various topics. They present explicit directions of how to use each of the different strategies throughout the book.

I found this book to be very informative. It has a lot of information that can be applied on a daily basis in teaching. There are many different ideas that I have applied, but one that I really took to heart was providing timely feedback to students. In the book it tells just how important it is to provide feedback in a timely manner to improve students' learning. This completely makes sense. If students don't get feedback on their work until you have moved on in the learning, they aren't going to get nearly as much out of it. I have made an effort to provide feedback quickly by returning papers to students by the next class. This has elicited many more questions from students, which is definitely a good thing. Before this, students just kind of glanced at their papers when they received them and had very few questions. This is just one example of a strategy that I have acquired from this book. There are many others. The strategies from this book were very well described in detail. I was never left guessing as to how to accomplish any of the tasks that had been presented. I would definitely recommend this to someone, especially if they were new to teaching.

Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D. J., & Pollock, J. E. (2001). Classroom instruction that works: Research based strategies for increasing student achievement. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

 http://www.amazon.com/Classroom-Instruction-That-Works-Research-Based/dp/tags-on-product/0871205041

The article I read for this journal focused on the differences between readers who are engaged and those who aren't. An engaged reader is a student who wants to read both to gain knowledge and for their own enjoyment. Sometimes it seems as you talk to students that there aren't that many of these. As you could probably assume, students who are engaged in reading are more likely to be successful readers. The reason that I chose this article was first because it was directly applicable to our class. Another was that I would like to be able to get more students to become engaged readers. If it is possible to get some students to want to read on their own it would be a great accomplishment. I think very often students don't like to read because they aren't interested in the readings they are assigned. If, as a teacher, you are able to find subject matter that can interest students they would be much more likely to be engaged readers. The research in this article found some interesting information. One interesting bit was that students' motivation to read decreased as they aged. This seems to make a lot of sense to me. For one thing I believe that very often the reading that students are assigned is very, for a lack of a better word, boring. It could be a good thing to try to provide students with a greater variety of books that may be able to evoke more motivation to read. Another part of this article spoke to the idea that relating the information in readings to real life experiences. This seems to me to be one of the most important things a teacher can do. If teachers are able to relate the information in the readings to real world experiences the students are more likely to grasp the information. Simply having the students read a text and then not providing any real-world context doesn't accomplish a whole lot. For me, the information that has stuck with me the longest is that which was related directly to stories that the instructor told

For my first journal article I read an article about helping struggling readers in the middle school age range. The reason that I found this article interesting was because there are so many students that I encounter at the high school level that have a very difficult time reading. Sometimes I wonder how they are even able to complete assignments with a lack of reading skill. If students were able to improve their reading level before they got to the high school level it would be far easier for these students to learn. I learned through this article that the San Diego area has a program called the Accelerated Literacy program to help struggling readers. This program has teachers specifically assigned to improving struggling students' literacy. They work with the students in a more direct fashion to help them improve their reading. I like the idea of focusing on improving this skill with the students because it is such a big part of what the students will need for the rest of their lives. Also, these teachers in the Accelerated Literacy program came up with themed booklists to incorporate the curriculum as well as finding books that students would find interesting. This, to me, is a very important piece. If a teacher is able to spark an interest in reading these students will probably be a lot more likely to be successful at it. Also, if the books are tied to the curriculum, these students will also be learning pertinent information. I know lots of school districts have programs like this, but I really liked the idea of coming up with booklists that might spark interest with students. Improving reading ability in students impacts how they will be able to learn for the rest of their lives.