Teachers’s Link of the Week – Story Machine

Spin the Story Machine to help you think of characters and settings for the story, then choose your format (e.g postcard, newspaper article, letter) write and illustrate your story and send it around the world to print. A fun way to integrate technology into story writing time.

Read Full Post »

Teacher’s Link of the Week – Puzzle Maker

Armored Penguin has a strange name but a great puzzle making feature! You can make:

• Crosswords
• Wordfinds
• Word Scrambles

It is all free and a great way to make vocab or spelling puzzles. Or you could get your class to make a list of words from their favourite books and then they could turn it into a puzzle for the rest of the class.

Read Full Post »

Teachers Link of the Week – Computer Lab Favourites

The Scholastic website is a behemoth of information and resources and the Computer Lab Favoritespage is one of the best for classroom use. It contains over 50 activities split into curriculum areas including Language Arts, where most of the reading related content is. There are story starters, interactive story books with audio narration, vocabulary games and interactive fiction.

Another great feature of the site is the inbuilt Word Wizard. You can double click any word on the page and a definition and pronounciation guide will appear in the Word Wizard window. If only every web site could have this feature!

Read Full Post »

Teacher’s Link of the Week – Literacy is Priceless

This weeks link is a blog. Literacy is Pricelessis one of those blogs that brings great things to our attention. This blog is focused on sharing fun and free reading resources on the web, primarily for teachers of children in Year Zero to Year Six. It’s a great way to constantly be supplied with fresh and interesting ideas. If you are keen to find more blogs that match your interests, or to read some posts about a particular teaching focus you have, go to Google’s Blog Search and see what you can dig up.

Read Full Post »

Teachers Link of the Week – Guys Read

Guysread.com is a site brought to you by Jon Scieszka, author of The Stinky Cheese Man and The Time Warp Trio series. If you haven’t read The Stinky Cheese Man or The True Story of the Three Little pigs, then I recommend you rush to your library and grab it now. Some of the first and best fractured fairy tales ever and perfect to read to a class of Y3 and up.

 Jon has taken his irreverent and hilarious approach to writing and channelled into a couple of good web sites – one, his pie-chart-filled personal site, is purportedly the on-line home of Jon Scieszka Worldwide, motto : There is no i in cheese. The other is Guys Read.

To borrow the description from the home page “Guys Read is an web-based literacy programme I’ve made to help boys find stuff they like to read.” Great intentions from the first National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature. On the site you can search for book recommendations based around other books you have enjoyed,  find some sure-fire guys-picks, learn about setting up a Guys Read programme yourself and follow links to authors and illustrators web pages.

Read Full Post »

Teacher’s Link of the Week

Do you know what is available on The Reading Crusade Website?  You can download RC posters and the teacher resource pack. You can register your school online and check out who has already registered and you can check our top 10 lists of read alouds, rugby resources, Te Reo resources and more.

Read Full Post »