I love learning and I also love implementing what I learn into my classroom!!!

This week I’m working on Grad homework and I couldn’t help but get off focus because I would find myself getting swept away into an educational website to support my Language Arts block!

Into the Book is a website that offers premade Reading questions for educators and sentence stems and guidelines on introducing language art content such as; Text to Self, Text to World, Making Connection Stems to facilitate further discussion, and journal entry ideas. I teach first grade, but this website can be modified for many grade levels and often provides me with the brainstorming ideas I need to capture my student’s interest and creative lesson planning. http://reading.ecb.org/teacher/makingconnections.html

In addition this website is an interactive site for students! I mean hello they have a part that students have to use invisible ink to get the parts of the text and then they can type their own part of the story! Sure typing may seem a bit challenging to first graders but this activity can be used for students to orally share their remaining parts of the story and for older grades they can type the missing parts to make the story make sense and share their creative story with a partner, which in turns builds collaboration with peers and constructive feedback.

Finally, if you’re like me you need visual! So here is a sample of their Teacher Guide that helps students with the strategy of visualizing http://reading.ecb.org/teacher/downloads/Visualizing_PictureShow_TeacherGuide.pdf?login=cruz00244

Reading Rockets - http://www.readingrockets.org This website offers insight on how to support struggling readers, professional development webcasts, and a section with Children’s Books and Authors. One of my favorite books that I read this summer was Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, and Reading Rockets provides video interviews with the author! To have an educational website that has lessons and videos is important to me, because I can trust the site for educational purposes, and also have a valid website link that allows me to hear and see an author’s voice and share/show the video with my scholars who are also looking for an author who shares similar experiences and looks and feels like them. Here is a link to her video it’s less than 2 minutes http://www.readingrockets.org/books/interviews/woodson

Another website I enjoy is Storyline Online because it offers actors who read a children’s book, but allows scholars to hear a book in a different person’s voice rather than the educators or parents voice. I thoroughly enjoy this website because once you register you will get email updates on when a new book is released. This website can be useful as for an educator, because you can set up a student on a chrome book and have him listen to the books during independent reading, provide audio books that are for struggling readers or English Language Learners, or even use the books on Storyline Online to be read aloud has a lesson and demonstrate with your scholars how words flow together with description and merge your lessons with English TEKS such as comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, and expressional reading. https://www.storylineonline.net/

Thanks for reading and be sure to leave a comment on Twitter with your favorite educational websites!

~Cruz #shoesonbackwards.com