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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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The ideas about engagement and motivation and their place in encouraging at-risk students to read was incredibly interesting to me.  I wonder in which district in Michigan the study was done.

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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.

Ediger, M. (2000). Teaching Reading In The Social Studies [Abstract]. College Student Journal. Retrieved January 29, 2012, from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_1_34/ai_62839401/?tag=content;col1 For my first journal article I choose an article that covers teaching in reading in social studies. The article discusses how teachers should use methods of guiding students to comprehension and understanding of ideas in print. Students need word recognition skills which can lead to meaningful learning. This is crucial for students to develop necessary skills to achieve a higher understanding in this subject area. To do this teaching reading across the subject will benefit as students learn the important facts, concepts, and ideas the curriculum. As a social studies teacher, you need to be active in students reading by helping with comprehension which can lead to a better understanding of the material. The article offers several methods on how to do this. These include adding new words found in readings as vocabulary, reading orally in small groups, using a student aid to read orally, using tape recordings of the section, individual readings, and using journals during readings. Overall I thought this article was great because while it provided you many ideas and practices that you could actually use in your classroom. In the end, having actual methods to use first hand will benefit us as teachers the most. It will just be up to use to master using them in the classroom.

Resources for teachers from Scholastic

"Teachers of English need to reach the tough guys out there, and they are probably not going to do it by prescribing another go at The Sound and the Fury. The problem is not so much that tough guys lack the brainpower to read: they simply do not want to." I like the suggestions given for books to motivate adolescent male readers given in this article. I appreciate how Lawrence Baines has collected information over the years to share with us as teachers.

I always try to do an interest inventory with students and find books that fall into these interests to offer for independent reading time. I also love informational books that center around sports and life oddities, such as Ripley's or Guiness Book of World Records. Boys seem to like these types of books. I have used Sports Illustrated for Kids also as an offer for reading. For class books, I have used "The Air Down Here" by Gil Alicea, a teenage boy from the Bronx. It is written in journal format and tells about his life in his own words. I used this with 8th graders and the boys especially seemed to "grudgingly" get interested and want to read more! I also found that books about aliens, Big Foot, Sasquatch and those types of informational books were interesting to them as well!

When I was a media center teacher, I could not keep the Guinness or Ripley books on the shelf! I think besides the "ew" factor, another draw is (of course) the pictures, and small chunks of text.

I read this article with the idea that I would do a graphic organizer, except once I got started I realized that this held some important information, but I kept getting confused with the layout of the article - i.e. finding what were the big points and the sub points. So, I decided to use Livebinders.com to find a way to organize it, visually, for myself and anyone else who wanted to take a peek. This is the website for the original article: http://www.prel.org/products/re_/ES0419.htm This is the website for my livebinder: http://www.livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=322029

Warren Woods Middle School - March 22, 23, 2012

Thank you for sharing! I will pass this along to my collegues too :)

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This website allows you to create a "corkboard" page where you can link all your favorite websites for your students to use.

Well done, Jamie! This could also be a way to curate resources for a content unit.

What an interesting idea! I would love to create one for the math classes I teach. I always have parents asking what they can do at home for review. Having a central location for them to go to would be a great educational tool. Thanks for sharing.

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