Reading Resources Network | Jan Brett | Phonics | ELL Reading Practice
Author Calendar | Parent Newsletter | Family Resources | 2005 Read | Author Studies | Publish Student Work Online

• Reading Resources Network on Scholastic.com provides "up-to-date research and best practices" to empower teachers and "create readers."

• A great site for K-2 students to practice reading skills is Starfall.com.  Students can practice letter recognition or work through the Learn To Read books, games, and resources. The site also has support for parents and teachers who are using the site.

• Kathy Diaz and a team of teachers at Stone Ranch have been using Bookadventure.com, a free site sponsored by Sylvan Learning.  It allows students to take quizzes on books they read and to earn prizes.

• Refer to the Author Studies  calendar at Scholastic.com to plan for scheduled author chats. For additional resources visit the PUSD Strategies for a Successful Chat web page.

• Phonics Practice  and Chants for Phonemic Awareness instruction for ELL students.

• Graphic Organizers can be downloaded from Scholastic's site to help students use better strategies to organize and construct meaning as they read.

• Reading practice for ELL students (Spanish, French, German, Italian, English)

• The Pacific Resources for Education and Learning website has a tremendous amount of materials to increase language art and math skills for students from many cultures. You can read an excellent book, Focus on Fluency on this website. You can also search for any of the following tools to help with early literacy instruction: research papers, activities/strategies, assessments, policies, or family and community resources.

• Jan Brett has a great site where students can improve their reading and writing skills. By following her directions students can use her books to write and perform amazing plays.  She even provides masks or t-shirt decals to help with costumes. As students write the play they'll be required to stretch their vocabulary as they choose words telling actors and actresses how to say their lines.

• Print parent newsletters about reading for your students' grade level.

• Also be sure to view the many wonderful sites that support reading instruction on the Resources for Families page.

• For great book lists for "young adult" readers (5th and up) visit the Young Adult Library Resources Association page.

• KidsReads.com is like a giant online book club for kids. Share favorite books, write reviews, read reviews, talk about favorite books, series, and authors. Sponsored by Disney.

• Another book club for kids can be found at the Random House website for kids. Students can participate in book adventures and activities from "the Magic Treehouse", "Junie B. Jones,"  "Nate the Great," and other series.

• Kids will love Scholastic's new Flashlight Reader's book club. Students read great books and hear authors describe just how they tackle the craft of writing.

• Students are often captivated by the works of a specific author, making author studies an exciting adventure in reading.  If you didn't find an author on the Scholastic Authors Site, try one of these:
  1. Yahooligan's Author Directory
  2. Children's Authors and Illustrators on the Web,  
  3. The HarperCollins.com Author in the Spotlight site
  4. The Kids at Random House Author Spotlight site
  5. Channel 4's BookBox Website
  6. Children's and Young Adult's Authors and
       Illustrators,
  7. Fairrosa Cyber Library of Children's Literature

• Don't miss this year's 2005 Second Read! It will be held on Friday, December 3, 2004.

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Scholastic.com has an excellent section of teacher training and resources for Guided Reading by Gay Su Pinnell

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• Visit the Read-Write-Think website sponsored by the International Reading Associatioin, National Association of English Teachers, and Marco Polo for high quality resources for literacy instruction. You'll find graphic organizers, lesson plans, and online practice tools for students. Be sure to visit the Student Materials section.  There is a template for students to create a six page Stapleless Book and the Flip A Chip word study  game.
  
  Flip a Chip Instructions | Flip a Chip Game
  Stapleless Book Instructions
  Stapleless Book Planning Sheet
  Stapleless Book Online Generator
   

• Scholastic's Skills and Strategies section of the Language Arts pages for teachers provide multiple resources for students to learn and practice literacy strategies. For lesson plans and activities you can search their database by grade level.

• Teachers will definitely want to bookmark ReadingLady.com, a site written by a first grade teacher who shares lessons and provides professional resources and information about Reading Workshop, Reading for Meaning - Using Thinking Strategies to Support Independent Reading, Four Blocks and Writing Workshop.

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Teaching Writing | Lesson Plans and Activities |Persuasive Writing | Writer's Workshop
Editing Conferences | PUSD Prompts | Shape Books

• For great professional articles on writing instruction as well as activities and resources, visit Scholastic's Teaching Writing Page.

• For lesson plans and activities you can search the Scholastic lesson database by grade level or search subjects by grade level.

• For great persuasive writing topics, check out the Scholastic News Vote Now pages each week. The topics are always real world and very kid-friendly.

• The Writer's Toolkit on Channel 4's BookBox website is an excellent resource for young writers. It has tools to help with getting started, character development, plot development, writing dialogue, and much more. Be sure to visit the "games" section of the site where you can learn how to write limericks, how to turn your favorite book into a film, or even try finishing the missing parts of stories.

• Writer's Workshop This is an award winning site created by a teacher to share the strategies of Writer's Workshop. Until this site can be found again, try this Writer's Workshop on the Teachers First website.

• Lesley University published a very good article by a teacher who has developed some creative and helpful resources for editing conferences and revising strategies to use with students.

• PUSD's writing assessments and prompts.

• More PUSD writing assessments, prompts, rubrics, and anchor papers.

• This link has a large number of Shape Books you can print to encourage creative writing.

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Site for Teachers | 6 Traits Official Site
| Student Friendly Rubric | Lessons | Interactive Site

• Six traits writing assessment, a site for teachers using 6 traits in the classroom.

• Multiple writing resources from Northwest Regional Educational Library, the Official 6 Traits site.

• 6 Traits Student Friendly Rubric (5 point rubrics)

• 6 Point Student Friendly Rubrics for each of the 6 traits.

• Web resources for 6 Traits Writing Instruction

• The Billings School District in Billings, Montana created an excellent  interactive site with resources for 6 Traits.

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Grammar Handbook | Kid-Friendly Grammar
  | Grammar PowerPoints |
SchoolHouse Rock Grammar Lyrics

• The University of Illinois has published an online grammar handbook to use with writer's workshop.
• Stufun.com is a fun site with kid-friendly grammar information
• Capital Community College has prepared informational pages as well as PowerPoint presentations to explain grammar and writing concepts. This is a link to their exhaustive index.  Just look at the bold words to make it more manageable. This page even includes a link for students (or you!) to Ask Grammar their grammar questions.
• The lyrics to the Schoolhouse Rock grammar songs can be found at this site. You can also click on the titles at the bottom of the page to hear the songs.
• The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation is a great online tool for writers.  You simply click on grammar or punctuation in the sidebar and choose a topic from the pull-down menu.  All the resources appear instantly.

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• Be sure to visit the Spelling pages in Literacy Central for multiple resources to support word study in your classroom.

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 Quia Game for Greek and Latin Roots | Fact Monster

• For student practice of Greek and Latin Roots, visit this Quia site.

• Or visit Scholastic's Go for the Gold: It's Greek to Me site to practice Greek word roots at two levels.

• The Fact Monster web site has a great article titled "Word Wise" that explains Greek and Latin word roots. It also includes lists of Greek and Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes.

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Publish Student Writing | Publish Student Book Reviews

 Publishing Student
Writing Online

• Students can submit stories and poems to the KidAuthors site that publishes works from students around the world.

• Kid’s Online Magazine publishes writing, art, or music pieces that students submit to the site. The Teacher’s Corner gives tips for teachers to submit student work along with a flyer you can send home for parents.

• Students in Grades 5-8 can submit writings, read encouraging advice from published authors, and even enter writing contests at the Magicoul’s Nook website.

• The Writer's Window website from New Zealand publishes student writing for 5-18 year olds. Students can review other's writings or seek writing advice.

 Publishing Student Book Reviews Online

• Before publishing a book review online, students will want to visit Rodman Philbrick's lessons for Writing High-Quality Book Reviews.

• At the Book Hooks Site students can publish book reviews as well as stories, poems, and drawings.

• The Seminole County Public Library is looking for students to write book reviews of their books.

• Amazon accepts student reviews of their books. This is a link to the Children’s Books section of their site.

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 Merriam Webster | One Look | Visual Thesaurus

• For Merriam Webster's online dictionary and thesaurus.
• One Look allows you to look up words in multiple online dictionaries at once
• By using the Visual Thesaurus students can finally see the definition and connotation of each synonym generated. Or students can easily click on any of the synonyms on the screen to open a new search for words that have that specific connotation.
• For all the poets in your class, be sure to bookmark this rhyming dictionary.
• As you teach your students to create bibliographies for their reports and research papers, you may want to visit Easy Bib, a free online advanced bibliography maker. Another site that is especially helpful for younger students is: Noodle Tools Quick Cite .  For information on citing online resources, visit the Online Reference Guide to Using Internet Sources site: Citation Styles for Online Resources.

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• For a page filled with outstanding reading and writing contests for your students, visit the Scholastic Contest page.  Students can interact with authors, recommend new story ideas, illustrate new books, or write books, stories and letters to win one of the contests on this page.

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• For book lists, reading, writing, math, homework help, and more visit the Links for Learning Adventures Site.

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