This week, I have added links to various teacher resources that are available on the web. The five categories that I chose were Kid-Friendly History Sites, Lesson Plan Ideas, Smart Board Ideas , Teacher Resources, and Templates for Forms and Games.
1. Kid-friendly History Sites
There is nothing worse than planning to assign your students a research project and then spending hours on the web trying to find kid-friendly sites. While there are kid-friendly search engines (you can see a list of them at Search Engine Watch), I came up with this list of historical information sites for my students to use when researching their history projects.
Kidpede: While this site unfortunately has a lot of advertising, the information is very kid-friendly, with simpler text and multiple illustrations. I am using the Egypt page for a project that my students are doing in Social Studies.
This Day in History: This site which is sponsored by the History Channel shows children all of the important historical things that happened on a specific day. This site is fun to use if you are having the students write about their birthdays and want them to make connections with history.
2. Lesson Plan Ideas
There are numerous sites with lesson plan ideas that are available for teachers to access. If you need an idea for a creative lesson, it is sometimes helpful to see what your colleagues across the nation are doing.
Lesson Planet: This website has literally thousands of lesson plan ideas. I used it to get ideas on Native American art for an assignment in my classroom. The cost is $29.95 a year.
The Educator's Reference Desk: This is an online guide to building lesson plans, choosing curriculum, classroom management, and more. The best part is it's free. They also have pre-made lesson plans if you need ideas.
3. Smart Board Ideas
I chose this category because Smart Boards (or interactive white boards) are starting to show up in classrooms across the state. This is a fun and useful tool for teachers who wish to integrate technology with learning the basic three R's in their classrooms. As I do not know a great deal about all of the things a Smart Board can do, I included websites that have both training and presentation ideas for the board.
Educational Technology Training Center: This website has links to other websites with ideas for a variety of presentations for the board. I especially liked the ones that taught kids how to build graphs for example.
Scholastic.com: This site has over 800 possible interactive lessons for your students to try. It also has a guide that teaches you how to build your own activities.
4. Teacher Resources
One of the ideas that I have learned at school is that a classroom is part of the learning experience. You need to know how to lay out a classroom in ways that will facilitate learning and you need to know how to decorate it to do the same thing. This category that I created includes sites that have bulletin board, calendar, learning resources, art supplies, and more at teacher-friendly pricing.
Teacher Storehouse: Need bulletin board supplies? This site has terrific sets priced affordably. I got a 40-piece set for Ancient Egypt for only $9.99. The shipping was inexpensive too.
Teacher Paradise: This site has classroom supplies, but it also has free resources that allow for students to use interactive flash cards for math. Their pricing is reasonable too.
5. Templates for Forms and Games
I chose this final category as the worksheets that come provided with the textbooks in a classroom do not always cover information in interesting ways. Interactive games that promote learning are good rewards for children that finish their work early. Pre-created worksheets, or better yet, templates for a teacher to create their own, are valuable time-savers.
Rubistar: This was a website that my cooperating teacher showed me. It allows a teacher to create rubrics for both written and verbal assignments. The nice thing about it is you can use either the pre-created options for a rubric or you can create your own categories. You can also save the rubrics for future use. I used this site when I needed a rubric for an oral report that I had my students do. Best of all, the site is free!
Enchanted Learning: My cooperating teacher for Practicum I showed me this website. It has worksheets, both pre-made and creatable, plus activities and fact pages that kids can learn from. The activities and information cover all ages of elementary students. It only costs $20.00 for a one year subscription but the value is priceless.
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1 comment:
Wow you have some great links! I am either going to also add these to my page of stick them in my favorites bar. I really like the Educators Reference Desk. That looks like it will be a very helpful tool that I will want to come back to.
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