Teacher Resources

Looking for new ways to help students develop phonemic awareness? ReadWrite Think.org’s revised Picture Match game offers fun ways to practice using a variety of sounds. The game includes beginning-letter sounds, short vowels and long vowels. The site also includes lesson plans. www.readwritethink.org/student_mat/student_material.asp?id=4 .

 

Visual learners make up more than 60 percent of the population. And even those who learn best by hearing or doing can benefit from highly visual material. Get some good ideas and tap into the love many students have for comic books and graphic novels in Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher’s Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills.  (ISBN: 978-1-4129-5312-2, Corwin Press, www.corwinpress.com. )

 

When students take notes, they are more likely to remember what was said in class. But students may not know how to take effective notes. That’s the purpose of How to Take Great Notes in Class and From Textbooks and Become an A+ Student by James Roberts. Keep a copy handy for quick lessons—or for students to consult.

(ISBN: 9781-8917-0709-4, Lawrence House Publishers, www.budbooks.com. )

 

Ancient Chinese oracle bones. An 11^th century Serbian manuscript. The oldest European map of the Western Hemisphere. The World Digital Library makes these and other ancient treasures from national libraries around the world available to anyone with a computer modem. In addition to print, the site also includes photographs, films and audio tracks. Access the collection at www.wdl.org/en .

 

Did you ever read an education book and think, “Well, that would never work in my classroom”? The goal of Do-able Differentiation is to make differentiated instruction work in real classrooms with real students. It’s short on jargon and long on practicalities. Authors Michael Ford and Michael Opitz include diagrams, sample lessons, suggested texts and other easy-to-adopt ideas. (ISBN:9780-3250-1283-4, Heinemann Publishers, www.heinemann.com .)

 

Building Reading Skills Teach students to look for an author’s purpose

Even in elementary school, students receive a barrage of information every day.

This only increases in middle and high school. All this information may be useful and helpful. But showing your students how to identify important information may be one of the most critical skills you teach them.  Give students these guidelines to determine importance: 

• Let the book or text be a guide.  With older elementary students, books and texts will be divided into chapters and will almost certainly have a Table of Contents.

Teach students to always preview the Table of Contents—it is a road map to reading.

Using the Table of Contents, students can get an outline of the book, an idea of the topics most important to the author—and they can even make predictions.

• Determine the author’s purpose.  Ask students questions like, “Why do you think the author wrote this book?” If students need more guidance, continue with, “Does the author want to teach us something?” “Does he want to make us laugh?”

• Get more specific once your class agrees on a purpose. “Okay, so the author wants us to learn about horses. What do you think is more important to the author:  the information he gives us about what horses eat or the barn where the horses live?”  Source: Divonna M. Stebick, Comprehension Strategies for Your K–6 Literacy Classroom, ISBN: 978-1-4129-4043-6 (Corwin Press, www.corwinpress.com ).

 

Bringing Lessons to Life  Create an electronic scrapbook.  Making scrapbooks is a popular hobby. Why not use technology to create an electronic scrapbook? Students will develop research skills and learn how to do oral presentations. Here’s how:

1. Talk about scrapbooks. Have any of your students ever kept a scrapbook?  Do you have a scrapbook that you can share? Talk about how you decided which “scraps” would be included.

2. Tell students they will create electronic scrapbooks based on works of literature. Assign students to use the Internet for research. As they locate websites on authors, time periods and their selected literary works, be sure students evaluate the information for accuracy.

3. Have students capture “scraps” of information for their scrapbooks.  Have them include visual images, as well. They should also search for multi-media such as oral recordings and video clips. As they capture the information, make sure they record the source for each item.  This is also a good time to teach students about the meaning of Fair Use under copyright laws.

4. Have students use presentation software (such as PowerPoint®) to create scrapbooks to present to the class. Emphasize that their oral presentations should provide more detail than shown on each slide.  Also remind them not to read their slides to the audience.

5. Ask students to share their scrapbooks with the class. In addition to sharing what they have learned, students should be prepared to defend their choices. Why did they choose each “scrap” of information?  Source: “Literary Scrapbooks Online: An Electronic Reader-Response Project,” ReadWriteThink, www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=787 .