TEMS520

This site has interactive lessons to promote oral language in kindergarteners. It has slide shows and activities with pauses for discussion with a partner. I have used it with some of my kindergarten students I have in my oral language group. The categories covered are: families, friends, transportation, food, animals, neighborhood, weather, plants, amazing creatures, and I Know a Lot! It also incorporates some classification and matching games in some of the lessons.

We know oral language development is critical for early literacy. However, it is important for teachers of all grades to remember the importance of talk in learning--even for adults! +2

"The Library of Michigan has announced the list of the 2012 Michigan Notable Books - 20 books highlighting Michigan people, places and events. The list highlights exceptional "Michigan books" published in 2011 that bring attention to Michigan authors and topics." Includes links to previous years' lists.

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

Great interactive reading activity for a Spanish classroom! 

This is an article about an elementary school reading specialist who works with teachers to help improve literacy in her school. In the article she gives 12 "lit tips" to help students with reading and writing. Most are geared towards elementary students, but they are very practical and some could also have applications in a secondary classroom. I especially like the "CUPS" tip for proofreading writing, check Capitalization, Understanding, Punctuation and then Spelling to ensure good writing. Very easy to remember!

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

This is a great resource for picture story books that can be integrated into math.  This site primarily lists books for lower el.  There are books that can teach money, counting, graphing, and measurement just to name a few. 

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.

With classrooms becoming more and more mainstreamed I thought that this article/website would help general education teacher understand how to create a Behavior Intervention Plan. This text focuses more on kids with autism which I found to be important because of the increased awareness of students with this disability. Student with autism can be a challenge for any teacher to teach. The skills that they usually can be taught are social, daily living, and task skills. One way to help in assisting teachers and the students in doing this is creating behavior intervention plans. With autistic students we need to use special strategies to teach them these skills and the behavior intervention plans provide that strategy. There are several steps that go into the behavior intervention plans that ensure that the students get the most out of the plan. First the teacher will need to record the student's behavior. The behaviors the teacher is looking for are problem behaviors like biting and throwing objects and skill behaviors like language or social skills. Also the teacher will need to record the frequency, duration, and time of these behaviors. Next would be an ABC analysis of the student. The A part means antecedent, what happened before the behavior. The B part would require an analysis of the behavior itself. The C part would be the consequence of the behaviors or what happened after. Following this be choosing a target for the student or goal such as choosing 1-2 skill behaviors and 1 problem behavior to work on. The last few steps include choosing a Right Intervention Strategy for the student with autism. This could include choosing reinforcement such as sensory time, making a structured schedule, and consistent intervention to any issues. In the end you should always continue to analyze the behavior intervention plan.

This article is about teacher-student relationships. The student-teacher relationship is one of the most important factors of teaching that can be neglected. The article found that enhancing teacher-student relationships is necessary to raising student achievement because that achievement is linked to adolescent's need of having secure attachments. This is like students attachments to parents, but only with teachers. Thus research has shown that students with secure attachments do better in school. It also offers some ways in which teachers can improve teacher-student relations. Some of these methods include having an increased sensitivity and have positive interactions with students, to be well-prepared for class and hold high expectations for students, be responsive to students and provide choices whenever possible, and help students be kind, helpful and accepting of one another. By understanding the roles in which teachers have in their relationships with students will help educators become more effective.

Stories read by authors and celebrities, with pictures from the books.

"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.

This blog is run by two Engilsh teachers and is a great resource for teachers because it focuses on what teachers want to know about a book: who will want to read it and how it could be used in a classroom. For example, the teachers talk about "A Wrinkle in Time" because of its 50th anniversary edition.

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The is a website that I used often when teaching. I think this is a valuable website because it has a lot of information and resources on comprehension strategies that were helpful in the classroom. The site also has a great section on readers theater with tons of scripts to download.

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Although this article is brief, it details three techniques that teachers can use to improve skills needed for informational reading. The techniques that the article details are: text impression, guided questions, and retelling pyramid. If you hope to encourage your students to read informational text and understand it, the three techniques described in the article are simple ways that can help you teach these skills to your class.

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"Teachers succeed as teachers only when their students succeed as learners" This website is intended to assist middle to high school students with nonfiction writing. This website has resources and strategies for teaching nonfiction to teens and adults. 'You Can Teach Writing' consists of blogs, writing topics, teacher services, student services, books, and events. If you teach older students this is great for some ideas :)

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This article was very interesting to me. I teach reading in an urban district so 'Delivering What Urban Readers Need' caught my eye. The article talks about the reading difficulty in schools that are predominately minority and economically disadvantaged. This article contains information on: 'An Acute Problem', 'Strategies for Urban Readers', 'Provide Balanced Reading Instruction', 'Identify Those At Risk', 'Provide Supplemental Instruction', 'Encourage Active Student Responding', 'Teach Within Small Groups', 'Monitor Student Learning', 'Create Peer-Mediated Learning Environments', ' Practice Nonexclusionary Classroom Management', 'Help Parents Reinforce Learning', and 'Offering Learners Their Best Chance'. I found the section on providing a balanced reading instruction to be the most relative and intriguing to me. After reading this article, I feel more confident then ever that all students need repitition! "Good reading instruction is explicit, intensive, and systematic. Such instruction is beneficial for all learners, but it is nonnegotiable for students at risk for reading failure." This article is important for teachers in urban districts or even if you have 'at risk' students...truly worth a look.

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PowerPoint that talks about OLD and some techniques to use including vocabulary development activities. Describes the 3 tiers of vocab words as well.