So many books! Apps for reading and a great website to help students or anyone to find out what's available to download on their iPods, smart phone or any other piece of technology that's out there kindle etc. and many are free to download.

http://www.cagle.com/politicalcartoons/

I found this website from a textbook from another class I am taking and wanted to share this with the class. This website has a great amount of political cartoons and can be useful to teachers to spark up interest in a particular subject and it is fun to read all types of cartoons. More kids need to realize that reading is fun and teachers need to find new ways of getting the students interest and cartoons is just an example of many tactics to get students started in finding out what they want to read.

This is a 25 minute video about how helping tutor students helps the community. Please take a few minutes and see what people are doing to help school age children read and write, hopefully you'll be as inspired as I was about spreading this message. 18 March 2008 Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to engage with their local school. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs.

I found this website when I was helping my 1st grade son to come up with ideas of books. It just points out what has been said many times in our class give students material that interests them and they will read. It is not ok to say boys will read more when they get older both boys and girls should be reading and enjoying it early in life. I am not liking the information that is out there that says boys develop later and its ok for them to not read as soon as girls.

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

http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/guided-comprehension-previewing-using-226.html

In using Anticipation guides I have had very good luck with bringing attention to the students about the subject and receiving great participation from the students. The website above explains how an anticipation guide is used as a pre-reading strategy to help the students get interested in the subject along with seeing what the student already knows about the subject. While I have used several anticipation guides in the past, I have learned there are several ways of introducing an anticipation guide. My experience has been to use it with the whole class and have the anticipation guide used as group work. So far my students have not felt pressured in participating and I have always been able to get full participation from all the students.
I am finding out how important reading is to the students for social studies I am working on a short book for the students for a lesson that will help tie in the culture of Kenyan African nomads of present day. I have had help with anticipation guides using the textbook and having the resources already printed out. Anticipation guides made for a much easier presentation to go along with my lessons as I was teaching along with the textbook. I am in the process of creating my own anticipation guide to get students excited about this book. The title of this book that will be read to the students is called Facing the Lion. This book is about a boy who grows up in Maasai on the African Savanna and tells the story about how he was educated and winds up coming to America to finish his college years and becomes a Professor at Harvard College. Every year this man named Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton goes back to Africa for a few months time to live in the village where he grew up and becomes a nomad for the time he stays in Africa. Coming up with anticipation guide questions is becoming a great challenge. The difficult time I am having is that the host teacher where I am student teaching wants me to play a recording of her reading the text, which I feel I could do just as well, but she wants to experiment with the idea of being able to re-teach and use this process for next year to see how this works while I am teaching.
lekuton, J., & Viola, H. (2003). Facing the lion. Washington D.C.: National Geographic.

I had a conversation with the principal in my school that I am student teaching and she had mentioned to me that she was looking for some information about parent involvement. I had typed this information up for her to express some ideas that I had found from a book that most SVSU students had to read. The book is titled Society, the Classroom, and Instructional Practice edited by Dr. Sparapani. In this book chapter 9 is written by LaCreta M. Clark and it focuses on the importance of having parental involvement in schools to help with the students' overall success as a person and to achieve higher challenges and opportunities. Since this class has been sharing some great ideas and concepts I thought it would be helpful to share this information regarding parent student involvement in secondary level teaching.
With the dynamics of parents' today parents are not just mother and father; parents today can be older siblings, extended family members, adoptive parents, foster parents, stepparents, same sex parents, blended family parents, and / or guardians. Because of the changes is it important for the teachers to realize the social differences that the students may have with their home environment and attempt to bring in teaching and lessons of relevancy of many different family life styles. As parents today are more educated and more employed than years past the responsibility of the teacher is weighed more heavily to make sure that the students are receiving more of a blend of: (1) culturally relevant education, (2) having an understanding of and sensitivity of a greater diversity of families, (3) have the understanding of keeping one's own personal beliefs to be bias free when it comes to other family life styles for the betterment of the students.
Research shows that for the students that have families involved with their education the students complete more homework, attend school at a higher frequency, earn higher grades than students who have families less involved with their schooling. As students reach higher grades from elementary to high school parent involvement tends to decrease as studies show, this chapter points out that parents need to stay evolved as much with the students as they reach higher grades to keep proper motivation in the students life. It is very important for the parents to keep open communication with teachers and themselves to provide adequate feedback to help meet the needs of keeping the students ability to reach his or her maximum potential of learning a success.
While students enter into higher grade levels it is important to realize parent involvement should never decrease, but other peers begin to dominate the influence of the students. It should be the parent's role to supervise and watch who their children are spending time with and what organizations they are involved with. Roles of open communication with teachers and parents can help keep students in positive peer relationships and keep the parents informed of any positive or negative activity that may be seen within school hours. By keeping a contact between teacher and parent situations of students can be rectified and handled promptly. By having teachers create well managed classroom structured classrooms peer group interaction can remain positive.
Parents and teachers that hold high expectations of the their children and students will more often reach the achievement level of higher grades and be influenced to pursuit college and reach these goals of being a successful student. I agree with the author in the importance of the role of a parent involvement, but realistically not all students are receiving the proper message from their family members about the importance of education, this is where teaching life lessons as a teacher has to increase with lesson and activities in the classroom. In recent years teachers have to depend on teaching more than just about content level, and to teach children.
This chapter has really increased by knowledge of importance of making sure that parents are involved with the learning process as much as possible to help their children to become as successful as possible in receiving the best education a teacher can provide. I also have a greater understanding of understanding that life as a teacher is much more than teaching daily lessons in fact that's probably one of the least concerns of a successful teacher. Managing the students in the classroom and providing for meaningful lessons that students can relate to real world activities and create a well rounded student. I am learning that not until a student's personal and everyday life can be successful can a student achieve his or her maximums potential in learning. With the help of the students parents the students can achieve this goal much quicker. It is up the teacher to help inform parents of practices and methods in helping their children where help may be needed then students will have a greater chance in succeeding in life.

Sparapani, E. F. (2011). Society, the classroom, and instructional practice, perspectives on issues affecting the secondary classroom in the twenty-first century. R&L Education.

I Entered the Citation above of the book I mentioned in my last post.

Plourde, Lee A., and Ludivina Prado. "Increasing reading comprehension through the explicit teaching of reading strategies: is there a difference among the genders?" Reading Improvement Spring 2011: 32+. Academic OneFile. Web. 29 Jan. 2012.

This study was very interesting in mentioning specific strategies of creating mental pictures for students of what they are reading, using background knowledge to make connections, asking questions before and after reading, and determining the most important ideas or themes of the reading these are all core strategies needed in strengthening and solidifying the reading pedagogy in the classroom.

I was really surprised about the brain is different in boys versus girls brain activity. In this study it was mentioned that a girl's brain at rest is more active than a boy's "activated brain." This creates a disadvantage for boys being to be able to interpret meaning of text than it would be for girls. This does not mean that boys can't develop as well as girls in interpreting and decoding. The overall test was to see if boys performed differently than girls; since there is evidence of the genders "wiring is different in the brains" evidence of this study does not suggest that gender is an issue when it comes to learning. The study shows that boys and girls are different and these differences need to be addressed as is every child's life experiences, so it is no longer accepted to have a teaching method of one style of teaching to fit all students. Many types of styles of teaching must be implemented into the classroom to meet the needs of the whole classroom.