assessment and reporting

Ahh, progress report time. Here are a few sites for you as you think about assessment - and a few you may want to pass along to the parents you conference with this month.

From low tech to high tech, this short article outlines ways we can use technology to support assessment and facilitate reporting to parents. Techno Tools for Assessment, a quick read at
http://teacher.scholastic.com/professional/childdev/
techno_tools.htm

This October 2004 report by the Family Research Project at Harvard outlines the benefits of homework - to parents and to teachers. Parental Involvement in Homework: A Review of Current Research and Its Implications for Teachers, After School Program Staff, and Parent Leaders at http://www.gse.harvard.edu/hfrp/projects/fine/resources/
research/homework.html

How Can Something as Simple as Reading to a Child Be So Effective? A good article by Jim Trelease, the Read Aloud Handbook guy. You can access it at
http://www.readingrockets.org/article.php?ID=546 - and maybe even send it home.

Aim High! Here's Bloom's Taxonomy- at your fingertips. Click on http://nerds.unl.edu/pages/preser/sec/articles/blooms.html. Enough said.

february days

February may be the shortest month but it's full of special days - the subject of this post.

I'm not sure where this falls in our elementary curriculum - but this is a really good reference for Black History Month. From the History Channel, it covers the history of the celebration, has video clips, the text of famous speeches, biographies of African-American icons, and much more. Go to http://www.historychannel.com/blackhistory/for this site about Black History Month.

You know those little candy hearts with the cute sayings on them? This site tells a little about their history and how they're made. It outlines the criteria for how the new sayings are chosen each year. Did you know every year there's a new category of sayings? Interesting nonfiction for your kids to read at The Valentine's Day History of Candy Hearts found at http://www.factmonster.com/spot/candyhearts1.html

Speaking of hearts, check out this one: The Heart: An Online Exploration is from the Franklin Institute Science Museum and makes for good nonfiction reading about real heart facts for Valentine's Day. Includes a pretty informative history of heart science. Lub-dub, lub- dub, click here - http://sln.fi.edu/biosci/heart.html.

There are lots of resources online about US Presidents and for President's Day. This site is actually a list of links to many of the other sites online. Visit Presidents of the United States at this KidsKonnect site at http://www.kidskonnect.com/Presidents/PresidentsHome.html.

Finally, here's a poem for Presidents' Day - with a monetary twist! Written in an upbeat manner specifically for kids, A Quarter and A Penny will give your students a brief account of the high points of Washington and Lincoln's tenure as President. Click on http://gilchriststudios.com/nlpf/archive/view.asp?presidents for the poem.

reading, writing, & 'rithmetic

From the people at Reading Rockets, a group funded by the U.S. Department of Education, comes this webpage called 103 Things To Do Before/During/After Reading. From improv to writing epilogues, this list has imaginative and fun ways for your students to show their understanding where reading is concerned. I especially like "Rosencrantz and Gildenstern" and "Write Out." Bookmark the entire list at http://www.readingrockets.org/article.php?ID=445.

Writing seems to be a big focus of grade level meetings with all of us reading different books on the subject. Access this site for lists of picture books that can serve as models for elements of writing like good beginnings, focus, voice, sentence fluency, and others. Using Picture Books to Teach Narrative and Six Trait Writing at http://geocities.com/oberry1790/narrativebibliography.htm

Just when you think the Web cannot become any more amazing, along comes a site like this. The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives offers educators online versions of the math manipulatives we have in our classrooms. There are graphs, base ten blocks, geoboards, pattern beads, puzzles - and that's just in one of the sections! Math concepts include number and operations, algebra, geometry, measurement, and data analysis and probability. The site's divided into PreK-2, 3-5, and beyond. This blurb doesn't do the site justice - be certain to visit! Virtual Manuipulatives can be viewed and utilized at http://matti.usu.edu/nlvm/nav/vlibrary.html

locally produced

There are a few things that have lately been put online by or for Newfound teachers. Since this blog is supposed to be a site for inspiration, they are this post's offerings...

Heads up fifth grade teachers! Here's a page of links for the study of the American Revolution. Joyce and I are working with her class as each child conducts research on a personality from the time period and writes a report. The students are then going to dress themselves as the person and talk about his or her life and contribution to the war while being videotaped. Links for the American Revolution is at http://www.newfound.k12.nh.us/bes/rev_war.htm. I can add to it if you post additional sites in the comments section below.

Christmas week I did a quick but meaningful literacy project teaming with BHVS's Melissa and NHCS's Stefanie. We presented the classes with Powerpoint slides of the lines of a Christmas poem, then the children interpreted the piece through class discussion. On their own, each child illustrated a line of the poem. Illustrations were then scanned (or photographed!) and inserted into each slide. Saved as a webpage, it was ready to go online and out to the public as a global holiday message from the children. The hardest part of this project was connecting with the author to get the okay to publish her copyrighted work (thank you, Ms. Watson!). View the projects while they're still online. A Christmas Wish Upon a Star: the NHCS version here and the BHVS one here. Thanks to both ladies and their classes for such thoughtful work!

tsunami

It's hard to know how kids are going to be impacted by this week's natural disaster in southeast Asia. Maybe they were too distracted with Christmas, new toys, and vacation to even notice. Or maybe they saw the videos over and over again on CNN because they happened to be home. On the chance that the subject might come up in a classroom, I offer these two sites for kids, both meant to help them understand how tsunamis happen.

The first - from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who maintain a great site for kids. This information, in storybook format, is based on the tsunamis that hit Hawaii. It explains what a tsunami is and leads the reader through the warning procedure that's in place in countries bordering the Pacific. The illustrations are very kid-friendly. As well as explaining this natural occurance, this might serve to reassure some of those kids who we know are worriers. Tsumani Warning at http://www.fema.gov/kids/tsunami_w.htm.

This next one is from a PBS site. It has a three-part animated clip that shows how the ocean floor can shift causing the water above to do the same and then materialize into a tsunami as it gets closer to shore. This animation can be replayed as you explain how the tsunami happened. The site - Savage Earth-Waves of Destruction found at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/savageearth/animations/tsunami/index.html

new year = new sites

Happy New Year and welcome to 2005 - almost! Here's a site for background information on how the New Year is celebrated around the world. New Year's Traditions at http://mn.essortment.com/newyearsevetr_rllr.htm

Recycle all those Christmas cards while giving your students authentic work with math skills. Careful measuring and folding (and following written directions) will produce the niftiest little boxes - lids and all. Bet they can't make just one! Greeting Card Boxes with directions in .pdf format will automatically download in Adobe Acrobat from http://www.exploratorium.com/math_explorer/greeting_card.pdf.

This might make an interesting reason to reflect and write: have your students compose a Ten Year Letter, to be opened and read in ten years! Content of the letter could be customized according to your own or your students' criteria. And you wouldn't necessarily have to mail them out in ten years - parents could hold them for their children. Details of this project can be found at this very long URL - http://familyfun.go.com/parties/holiday/feature/famf129newyear/famf129newyear2.html

we need a little Christmas, right this very minute...

Only two more weeks 'til the Big Day! With that in mind, here are a few of many holiday links online. If you have others to share, please do! Post them as comments below!

Let's start with December holidays in other lands. This link is to the Multi-Cultural Calendar, a project by the Global Schoolhouse folks. Have your students read accounts of celebrations in other lands by the very children who experience them. The calendar is also searchable by month, by holiday and by country - a good resource even when it's not holiday time here! December Holidays can be found at http://www.kidlink.org/KIDPROJ/MCC/.

You know how fascinated kids are with other languages? Visit this site for audio files of voices the world over wishing holiday greetings. There's also the written greeting as well. The Voices of Christmas at http://www.holidays.net/christmas/voices.htm. Nollaig chridheil agus Bliadhna mhath ùr! (that's Gaelic...and not found on this site. I got it from Brain Boost - see last post!)

Looking for a new and different Christmas story for your older students? Preview this one - a tale about the origin of Comet and how he happened to become part of Santa's team. It's fiction, I think...The Fifth Reindeer at http://www.soubly.net/Fifth/fifth1.htm.

And here are some stories for the younger set. Elves in Santa's Workshop are making lots of toys and there are stories to go along with each one. Kids can opt to read the story themselves or have it read online to them. There's even an option to print out pages to color. Wait, there's more! Reindeer stories in the Reindeer Barn, Mrs. Claus's stories in the Kitchen...just click around! Stories from The North Pole - http://www.northpole.com/Workshop/. Ho, ho, ho!

At History.org, a historical researcher from Colonial Williamsburg recounts how Christmas was celebrated in colonial Virginia. Interesting that it wasn't a great time for kids! Click http://www.history.org/Almanack/life/xmas/customs.cfm for Colonial Christmas Customs.

Here's a holiday feature where students can design their own TIME For Kids magazine covers. Student choose from pictures posted on the site, compose the headlines (within the space constraints of the online program - using critical thinking!), and write up their own "Top 5" list. Click and the cover magically appears as the student designed it! Print and use the cover as a tie to student writing, having kids write the articles to accompany their headlines! Holiday News Mag-o-Matic available at http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/specials/articles/0,6709,880208,00.html.

Last, here's an online version of that favorite Christmas story, The Night Before Christmas. There's a page for each section of the story with arrows for kids to advance from one page to the next. Too bad the link to have the story read aloud is broken. Victorian illustrations accompany each page.....hey, they look oddly like the ones that were in my Little Golden Book version way back when! The Night Before Christmas at http://www.childrenstory.com/christmas/b41.html.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a Good Night!

science & nature, reading games, and A.I.

The BBC sponsors this website about all things natural. Some of the information is specific to Great Britain - like facts about hedgehogs and ladybirds! But there's enough that's common to our area to make it a worthwhile investigation, especially if you have a class of budding naturalists! Great information at Science and Nature at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/.

Did you know there's a teacher from Rye who's in Antartica now with this team of researchers collecting and sending data that tells about the "bottom of the world?" This site is pretty technical but it's really interesting and there are activities and information that could be adapted to an elementary level. If you're studying polar regions or cold places, this site may be helpful. And the photographs are great. Teachers Experiencing Antarctica and the Arctic at http://tea.rice.edu/index.html

Here's a site of basic "skill and drill" type phonics activities, but beginning readers will love them. There are different early/emergent reading levels represented with short stories that stress individual phonetic elements or word attack skills. Long and short vowels, blends, digraphs, compound words - and more. All within the context of games, plays, songs, even a smattering of nonfiction. Give the kids headphones when they work at Starfall at http://www.starfall.com/.

This one's really eerie. Billed as the "no search search engine," the site says it uses totally artificial intelligence to answer questions posed. Type in a question and it gives you websites that provide the answer. I've tried a few times to stump it and so far have had no luck. Truly bizarre. Brain Boost at http://www.brainboost.com/. Let me know if you find a question it can't answer.

search. sing. go back in time.

It's a pretty well-accepted fact that Google is about the best search engine online. Now comes Google Cheat Sheet, a site that teaches you some of the ins and outs of many Google features. It shows you how to maximize your searching and how to use the Google search box as a calculator and dictionary. It gets into advanced operations and some of the other Google services (like Google Catalogs and Froogle - both for shopping!!) My favorite - Google Labs where you can see what the Google folks will be up to next! Google Cheat Sheet at http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html.

Want poems? Songs? Check out this site from CanTeach for an amazing collection of both! Poems are sorted into categories like seasons, special days, animals, math, language arts... and are the sort of poems that work well on charts at morning meeting time! This is one of the most extensive collections of poems for kids I've found on the web. Bookmark the site, copy/paste the poems into an Appleworks document to print - you get the idea! CanTeach: Songs & Poems at http://www.canteach.ca/elementary/songspoems.html.

This site is new to me - but I hope you've already seen it and used it because it's amazing! Eyewitness to History touts itself as being "History through the eyes of those who lived it" and covers time from the ancient world straight through to the 20th century and World War II. First person accounts of historical events make for fascinating reading as a teaching resource for you or a nonfiction piece to enhance learning for your students. Before you plan your next social studies units, be sure to visit Eyewitness to History at http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/index.html.

blame it on baseball

The nature of a blog is that it's updated on a regular basis - so that readers keep coming back to check it regularly. My intention was to update weekly and that's not happening. Honestly, when I haven't been doing budget or preparing presentation or planning for classes, I've been involved with the Red Sox and the playoffs. Anyway, I'll keep shooting for a week's time between postings - and hope that you'll understand if longer periods of time go by. I still think this blog idea is a good way to get information out.

First off - Space Day. I know you fifth grades work on the solar system and it's a subject that fascinates all ages. Check out this site founded by Lockheed Martin. The "Mission Fun" section has stellar games and activities. There are lots of astronomy links under 2005 Facts and Links. And if your kids are really into The Final Frontier, check out the 2005 Design Challenges. Students take on one of three space-related projects and, using their imaginations and creativity and the website as a resource, design a solution to a problem. Space Day judges then choose the best solutions and they're featured at the annual Space Day events in Washington in May! Explore Space Day at http://www.spaceday.org

Next, a site for photos. Pics4Learning is a collection of "copyright friendly" pictures - that is, permission has been given by the photographers for student use. You and your kids can use these pictures for instructional purposes, for web pages, and for projects. Find the pictures you want by searching by keyword or browsing by category. Directions for saving pictures are on the site. Check it out: Pics4Learning found at http://www.pics4learning.com/

Finally, check out this interactive Electoral College map of the USA. You can view it several different ways - detailing the votes each candidate has at this point, showing the results of the 2000 election, you can even customize it to show students what outcomes would be if a candidate gained the support of a particular swing state. Fool around with it - it's pretty neat! 270 to Win at http://www.270towin.com/

The other thing that makes a blog a blog - give & take and comments by the readers. I've changed things so that you can reply without having to "register" with the site. Now I hope you will.

spelling practice, literacy, and a follow-up

Here's a place where kids can practice spelling - even the words you choose for them! The site lets the viewer read/spell a word, then click to cover it, type to write it from memory, then check for accuracy. That technique sounds familiar, huh??? There are word lists on the site categorized by phonetic elements or by topic as well as lists kids themselves have generated. But the site also lets the viewer enter in other words for practice - so you could make a customized list for a student. It's pretty slick! Brought to you by a tech-savvy English primary school, it's LookCover at http://www.amblesideprimary.com/ambleweb/lookcover/lookcover.html

Have I read this whole site? No! What initially attracted me to this site was the online Student Materials area, thinking that a creative teacher could use these internet forms to supplement an existing lesson or book extension. But the actual lessons posted here are wonderful and feature well-known books - so you may be able to use the lessons and the forms. Lessons are grouped by grade level - and they all focus on increasing comprehension and higher order thinking skills. Pick a lesson, any lesson - and try it out. Let me know what you think of the forms, too. The ReadWriteThink website is from the International Reading Association and is at http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/index.asp

Lastly, if you want to follow up on some of the water activities from Friday's visit to Newfound Lake, visit Project Wet's website at http://www.projectwet.org. (Hmmm. Not sure about this photo thing. As much as I'd love to have some graphics here, I'm not crazy about the way it links to the picture site - I may take it off.)

good morning! site and thinking games

Now that you've gotten to know your students some and have begun to establish rules and procedures, I am beginning to come around to classes for a one-shot lesson - to tell students about myself and the new position and to introduce a page of links to information sites that change on a daily basis. The hope is that you might find a way to integrate this site into your curriculum or make it an independent activity or learning center. By the way, I'm still on the lookout for a site that has a good math problem that changes daily - sort of like a Problem of the Day. If you find anything, please send it my way. The Good Morning! Page at http://www.newfound.k12.nh.us/bes/goodmorning.htm

The Discovery Channel runs a great website called Discovery Schools. There's lots of good information here so take the time to browse the site at some point. But in the meantime, check out Brain Boosters, a section with short, top-notch puzzles and games that deal with logic, reasoning, and other creative thinking skills. This site will challenge the mind - even the adult one! And it's fun! Brain Boosters at http://school.discovery.com/brainboosters

handwriting, poetry, and more

This site is billed as "amazing" and it's actually pretty cool! The site generates custom practice work for handwriting and letter formation. Looking at it, I think it's pretty comparable to the Zaner-Blozer system we use. You can choose from dot-trace, dash-trace, or hollow-trace letters, then fill in a form box with a letter, word or sentence that you want the student to practice. Click "make worksheet" - and it does! Looks like it could be a good vehicle for practicing names, spelling words, and more. The site says it's for kindergarten and first grade - but there's also a section for practicing cursive letters. Go figure. Check it out: The Amazing Incredible Handwriting Worksheet Maker at http://www.handwritingworksheets.com/

Here's another amazing site that uses "forms," (like those boxes you fill in with your name, etc when you order things online). This site generates poetry and in formats I know we all use in school - like haiku, cinquain, diamantes, I Am poems, and many more. In all there are 50+ different formats that you or your kids can fill in to make original works of poetry. Have kids work at the computer alone or in pairs or project the page as a teacher directed class activity. Hmmm. Anyone want me to come into their class and do a lesson with this? Instant Poetry Forms at http://ettcweb.lr.k12.nj.us/forms/Poetry.htm

Finally, there's ePals, a wonderful site that links up students and classes around the globe. The site's pretty big with lots going on. Not only could your class find penpals, you can locate classes looking for collaborative work on projects. It's a pretty interesting and kid-friendly way to let your kids know there are other countries and cultures out there. Grab your tech log so you can record your hours when you check it out. Please post some ways that you and others could use this site?? Thanks! ePals at http://www.epals.com

testing, 1-2-3....

I've been thinking about this blog-thing for months now. It seems to be a good way to get messages out in an efficient manner. It models technology use and will, on a personal note, enhance my own PIP since the whole concept of blogging is foreign to me right now. And hey - the Democrats and Republicans had blogs, so do news agencies, so why not Newfound?

Is this the best way to communicate resources and ideas and get the technology word out? Will people read it? Who knows? What I do know is that it will give me a place to post resources that I find. It'll help me keep you informed on the progress of tech projects that are going on. It could serve as a place for discussions about educational technology. I'm hoping that some of you interested folk will make checking this site a routine. Maybe this blog will be the impetus to help those of you on the technology fence tip and fall into it. And if it turns out blogging doesn't work for you or for me, well - I can always take a tech-step backwards and bombard your inboxes with emails!

With apologies to Dr. Graziano, I've named this blog Techjaki. Sorry, John. It was just too good an opportunity to pass up.