Useful Information In and Out of the Classroom 10/17/14

Here are some interesting sites that I’ve found this week, thanks to my PLN. As a teacher, I feel we have to keep up to date concerning research in our field and current issues in the education system. I hope some of these inspire you, inform you, and even have you asking questions. Thank you for coming by and visiting!

Note: Each resource is labeled with a level and subject area to make it easier to use.

Levels: E: Elementary; M: Middle; H: High; G: General, all levels; SN: Special Needs; T: Teachers

Subject Areas: LA: Language Arts, English, Reading, Writing; M: Math; S: Science; Health; SS: Social Studies, Current Events; FA: Fine Arts; Music, Art, Drama; FL: Foreign Language; PE: Physical Ed; C: Career; A: All

WordWriter Halloween Activities - We've designed some free, downloadable resources to use with our new tool WordWriter, for you and your students to have a creative (and chilling!) October. (L:E; SA:LA)

Interactive Historical Thinking Poster – “Teaching history involves showing students how to use clues from primary and secondary sources to ask and answer good questions.Primary sources give us many clues about the past. They are the evidence—such as letters, newspapers, drawings, photographs, tools, or clothes—from the time period under investigation.Secondary sources are written by historians who use available materials to interpret the past. They provide analysis, summary of historic moments, and change over time.Use this poster with your elementary students to help them learn how to be history detectives.” (L:E; SA:SS)

Fakebook - “’Fakebook’ allows teachers and students to create imaginary profile pages for study purposes.” (L:G; SA:A)

Sound Uncovered – free iPad app; “Explore the surprising side of sound with Sound Uncovered, an interactive book featuring auditory illusions, acoustic phenomena, and other things that go bump, beep, boom, and vroom. From the makers of Color Uncovered—the Exploratorium—this app puts you at the center of the experiment: Hear with your eyes, see with your ears, make and modify recordings, test your hearing, and more. How do you make a saxophone growl? Are there secret messages in music played backward? Why does the sound of gum chewing drive some people mad? Listen up and find answers to these questions and more as you take an auditory trip to the place where sound gets truly interesting: the space between your ears.” (L:; SA:)

Alphabet Organizer – “Engage students and build phonemic awareness by using Alphabet Organizer in the classroom. Students create an alphabet book or alphabet chart with words for each letter of the alphabet. Or choose just one word per letter and upload an image to help early readers make a visual connection between the word and the beginning letter. Alphabet Organizer features our worksaver so that students can save a draft of their unfinished work or share their final work via e-mail.” (L:E; SA:LA)

Original Image: Tools by Pat Hensley