Category: Websites

Many people in the United States, particularly students, parents and teachers, join forces on Read Across America Day, annually held on March 2. This nationwide observance coincides with the birthday of Dr Seuss.

Here are some great reading websites for students K-5:

1. Aesop Fables—no ads
2. Aesop’s Fables
3. Audio stories
4. Childhood Stories
5. Classic Fairy Tales
6. Edutainment games and stories
7. Fables—Aesop—nicely done
8. Fairy Tales and Fables
9. Interactive storybook collection
10. Listen/read–Free non-fic audio books
11. Magic Keys–stories for youngers
12. Mighty Book
13. Open Library
14. PBS Stories–Between the Lions
15. RAZ Kids–wide variety of reading levels, age groups, with teacher dashboards
16. Signed stories
17. Starfall
18. Stories read by actors
19. Stories to read
20. Stories to read for youngsters
21. Stories to read from PBS kids
22. Stories to read–II
23. Stories to read—International Library
24. Stories—MeeGenius—read/to me
25. Stories—non-text
26. Story Scramble
27. Story time–visual
28. Storytime for me
29. Teach your monster to read (free)
30. Tumblebooks (fee)
31. Ziggity Zoom Stories

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These are clever approaches to keeping order among avid learners:

1. Bouncy Balls–balls bounce based on level of noise in the classroom
   
2. Calmness Counter–how noisy is your classroom? Let students see.
3. Class Dojo—class behavior mgmt
4. Class Badges
5. Doodle—schedule meetings, polls
6. Forms—Adobe interactive pdf, collect results
7. Google Safe Search Preferences
8. If This Then That—manage social networks
9. Open Badges
10. Password creator
11. Random Team Generator
12. Sign-up Genius–organize volunteers, presentations, lists of all sorts
13. Tagible–organize videos from YT, Vimeo, more
14. Teach with IPads
15. Too Noisy--another app to show noise level in classroom (app)
16. Volunteer Spot–organize with free online sign-up sheets

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Here’s a list of great 4th grade websites on Culture:

1. Classrooms around the world
2. Clothes around the world
3. Eat—food around the world
4. First Thanksgiving
5. Google World of Wonders
6. One day around the world–video
7. 360 Panorama of the world
8. Language Mapper—around the globe
9. Life in a Day—video (long)
10. School lunches around the world
11. Sleep—where children sleep around the world
12. US Languages
13. What we own—around the world
14. World National Anthem

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Here are some fun Valentine sites to fill those few minutes betwixt and between lessons, projects, bathroom breaks, lunch, and everything else:

1. Dress up the heart
2. ‘I love you’ in languages Afrikaans to Zulu
3. Line up the hearts
4. More heart writing
5. Valentine Day games and stories
6. Valentine drag-and-drop
7. Valentine match
8. Valentine mouse skills
9. Valentine projects from Winter Wonderland
10. Valentine puppy jigsaw
11. Valentine rebus game[gallery type="slideshow" ids="44901,44902,44903"]
12. Valentine rebuses
13. Valentine Sudoku
14. Valentine tic-tac-toe
15. Valentine typing
16. Valentine unscramble
17. Valentine’s Day apps
18. Write in a heart

Do you have any I missed?

Holiday Lesson Plans

Looking for holiday lesson plans? Here’s my collection.

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Here’re a wide variety of writing tools for students. Some practice good habits, others offer options for writing requirements. See what works for you (check here for updated links):

1. Character Trading Cards
2. Context Clues Millionaire
3. Friendly Letter Maker
4. Garfield teaches Writing Skills
5. Identify the Main Idea
6. Letter Generator
7. Main Idea Battleship
8. Make another story
9. Monster Project
10. Newspapers, posters, comics—learn to create
11. Using a table of contents
12. Videos—using Sock Puppets (iPads)
13. Writing games

Blogs

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Playful Learning (Parents’ Choice Gold Medal website) is a well-done, professional-looking website that  offers advice, projects, and visual images touting the benefits of education through play. The reader is drawn into the child-centered imagery and strong basic colors, wanting everything on offer so their child’s play areas can look and work as described.

Let’s back up a moment. Play as the vehicle of education is not a revolutionary idea. Pedagogy has long recommended ‘play’ as a superior teacher for youngers–

Play is the great synthesizing, integrating, and developing force in childhood and adolescence. –PsycINFO Database Record 2012 APA,

The play of children is not recreation; it means earnest work. Play is the purest intellectual production of the human being, in this stage … for the whole man is visible in them, in his finest capacities, in his innermost being.~ Friedrich Froebel

In general, research shows strong links between creative play and language, physical, cognitive, and social development. Play is a healthy, essential part of childhood. —Department of Education, Newfoundland Labrador

Young children learn the most important things not by being told but by constructing knowledge for themselves in interaction with the physical world and with other children – and the way they do this is by playing.” –Jones, E., & Reynolds, G.  “The play’s the thing: Teachers’ roles in children’s play”

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I include lots of links for my readers to sites that will help them integrate technology into education. They cover websites on lesson plans, math, keyboarding, classroom management, cloud computer, digital books, teacher resources, free tech resources, and more. On any given day, a third of visitors to Ask a Tech Teacher click through to one of these resources. Which links my readers select tells me a lot about the type of information they’re looking for.

Here’s a list of the top ten sites visitors selected from my blog:

1. Structuredlearning.net–lots of teachers are finding books/ebooks here for integrating tech into the classroom. This is where I make mine available.
2. abcya.com–a popular site with classroom edutainment
3. itunes.apple.com–last year the top click-through was a website. This year, teachers are looking for apps for iPads.
4. libraryspot.com–there’s a big uptick in using the internet for research this year over last year
5. kids.nationalgeographic.com–still more research. I’m seeing a trend
6. bigbrownbear.co.uk/keyboard/–One of my favorite sites to teach K/1 how to type
7. DanceMat Typing
8. Fact Monster–for research
9. Typing Web
10. World Almanac for Kids

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Need a few websites to fill in sponge time? Here are Holiday websites that will keep students busy while teaching them:

1. 12 Days of Christmas
2. Christmas—history—fun video
3. Gift Hunt–updated version of 12 Days of Christmas–just as much fun
4. Holiday collection
5. Holiday Crossword
6. Holiday Elf Games
7. Holiday hangman
8. Holiday Hangman II
9. Holiday music
10. Holiday music II–sing along with the music–the site provides the words
11. Holiday—Design Gingerbread House
12. Holiday—find the word
13. Holiday—match game
14. Holiday—Math Facts
15. Holiday—North Pole Academy
16. Holidays around the world
17. Holidays–various
18. NORAD Santa
19. Penguin Show
20. Reindeer Orchestra
21. Santa Tracker

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Every week, I share a website that inspired my students. This one is perfect for Hour of Code. Make yourself a hero for an hour:

Age:

Grades 3-8 (or younger, or older)

Topic:

Problem-solving, critical thinking, building

Address:

Minecraft

Review:

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These cover elementary school through high school (sites like Open Library and Gutenberg Press where students can get free copies of books they need for class):

Read Stories

1. Aesop Fables—no ads
2. Aesop’s Fables
3. Audio stories
4. Childhood Stories
5. Classic Fairy Tales
6. Edutainment games and stories
7. Fables—Aesop—nicely done
8. Fairy Tales and Fables
9. Project Gutenberg
10. Listen/read–Free non-fic audio books
11. Magic Keys–stories for youngers
12. Mighty Book
13. Open Library
14. RAZ Kids–wide variety of reading levels, age groups, with teacher dashboards
15. Starfall
16. Stories read by actors
17. Stories to read–II
18. Stories to read—International Library
19. Story time–visual
20. Teach your monster to read (free)
21. Tumblebooks (fee)
22. Ziggity Zoom Stories

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