More Interactive Games

I was looking over Larry Ferlzo’s Website of the Day… and I came across I Know That. This is an interactive website for students in PreK – 6th. There are tons of games, covering both reading and math.

 I clicked on first grade games and I found Word Match. Select a specific sound to practice, such as /oo/ or r blends, and the game begins. If you don’t want to register, simply click on Maybe Later to bypass. Students are given a series of pictures to match with the correct words. The math games are great too! There is a cute series of games for reinforcing money. – Melissa

Wordmaster

Mary Anne Zehr recently had a very interesting post on her blog, Learning the Language. She reported on Larry Ferlazzo’s best educational websites of 2007.  

 

His pick for the number one online game is Wordmaster from BBC. This vocabulary game gives students a sentence with a blank in it.  They need to use context clues to figure out the missing words. The game is played like hangman. But watch out – there is a timer!

-Melissa

Literacy Connections

Literacy Connections is a great place to go for general literacy resources. 

Literacy Connections provides a wealth of information on reading, teaching, and tutoring techniques, ESL literacy, an adult literacy.  We recommend resources that are useful for teachers, volunteers, and directors of literacy programs.  Topics include the language experience approach, phonics, word study, and the best in children’s literature.

 

As a teacher on a small budget, I found the article, Books on a Budget particularly useful.  I also took notice of their collection of writing prompts.  I hope you find this site as useful as I have.

-Melissa

Reader’s Theater

I have found that one of the best ways to improve fluency is have my kids do Reader’s Theater.  Not only is great for them, but they also have a blast doing it.  We usually just do it for fun in the classroom.  Occasionally, I’ll invite the first grade class from next door over to see what we have been doing.  My students really enjoy performing for an audience!

 

Once a year, however, we do a big reader’s theater production for all of the first grade parents.  Each first grade classroom performs their own play, complete with props and costumes.  I just found some really great FREE scripts at Teaching Heart that I wanted to pass along.

-Melissa

A free early literacy resource to pass along…

Since this is my second official post, I suppose I should introduce myself as well!

My name is Anna and I work at Wireless Generation, a New York-based education technology company that focuses on developing early literacy and math instructional tools and curricula. As a developer of early literacy products, I spend a lot of time in K-3 classrooms across the United States observing teachers working with budding readers. I then take ideas and feedback from teachers back to my office where I work with a team of developers to create useful products that help teachers teach young children how to read. Before becoming a product developer, I taught early literacy classes to children and English conversation classes to adults in Osaka, Japan.

I would like to share with you a web site that is near and dear to my heart, as I have been working on it for the past year with my colleagues, as well as with many teachers across the States, but particularly in New York…

www.Free-Reading.net is a free online early literacy program that helps educators teach early literacy skills—in particular phonics and phonological awareness. The activities and sequences can be used to support a typical core or basal program or as part of word study time for teachers using a balanced literacy curricula. In addition, the site provides an opportunity for teachers to share their great ideas and activities.

Here are a few links on the site that I think literacy teachers will find particularly useful:

• Picture cards that contain illustrations of words for every letter of the alphabet.
• Sounds pronunciation guides for words broken into onset-rime, phonemes, etc.
• Hip hop music by Flocabulary that can be used to teach vocabulary words from popular books.
• Videos of teachers demonstrating lessons on the site.
• Dozens of fun decodable passages that can be used to help children learn how to sound out CVC words and words with letter combinations such as th, kn, oa, etc.
  
• Lots of cool lessons (for an example click here) added by teachers like you!

I hope you enjoy the site!