Lucy's Library Blast
September 25, 2017
Banned Books Week
It's always astonishing to students when I list books that have been banned over the years. Often even more astonishing, are the reasons why. Things have improved, thank goodness. Only 10% of the attempts to ban books in 2016 were successful. That's a long way from my student teaching days when they kept copies of Harry Potter behind the counter.
This is an excellent 3.41 minute video that contains the top 10 banned books of 2016. Please share at your discretion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O19TVmXWcyI&feature=youtu.be
How to get kids interested in books? Tell them they are off limits. Stop by and see our Banned Books display.
Online Annotation App - HYPOTHES.IS
If your students have devices and they can read online, I’d recommend the online annotation app Hypothes.is. It’s very intuitive, it allows teachers to post guided questions ahead of time, it allows students to access the group annotations at any time, and it allows teachers to see the kinds of annotations each student makes over time. It is free although you do need to join to save your work. There is also a group annotation option.
https://web.hypothes.is/annotating-with-groups/ Click on 'Paste a Link' to annotate from an online site.
Digital Anchor Texts Options:
Tween Tribune
Features a Monday morning reading and many articles to choose. www.tweentribune.com
Wonderpolis
Google News Archive
DoGoNews
DoGoBooks
Students can use this to see hot new books. This helps develop independent reading. You can create classes in news account. www.dogobooks.com
News In Levels
Read Works
Sign up via ReadWorksDigital. You can download or print text and have access to vocab lists. It’s high quality texts. Has lessons, skills and strategy. Can help improve reading comprehension. www.readworks.org
CommonLit
Free fiction and non-fiction texts and literary resources. Offers text dependent questions. www.commonlit.org
NewsELA
Free texts for educators. Very common. Most teachers know about it. www.newsela.com
Differentiated Reading
StepReads, from Read Works, are less complex versions of original articles. They are carefully handwritten by skilled writers who make sure to preserve:
- Important knowledge from the original article
- Key academic vocabulary words
- Important text structures
- The original author's craft
ACADEMIC TECHNOLOGY MARKETPLACE
ATM is your one stop resource for all MNPS-approved software. If you go to this site and click browse, you can search by content area. Interesting to browse through. The links to the sites are provided. http://atm.mnps.org/atm/Default.aspx