Category: Websites

Every Friday, I’ll send you a wonderful website (or more) that my classes and my parents love. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of your students as they are of mine.

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Every Friday, I share a website (or app) that I’ve heard about, checked into, been excited to use. This one is a math app. Since ‘math’ is by far the most popular search term of readers who seek out my blog, I know you’re going to enjoy this review.

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Every Friday, I share a website (or app) that I’ve heard about, checked into, been excited to use. This one is a math app. Since ‘math’ is by far the most popular search term of readers who seek out my blog, I know you’re going to enjoy this review.

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Kids love using iPads. All those fun activities that can be accessed quickly via the pad format are both stimulating andaddictive. I’m all for giving kids what they want in the way of educational tools, but there-in lies the rub:

How do you find those apps?

When my school asked me to come up with a collection to use on our new class-set of ipads (to cycle through grades 3-8), I thought it would be easy.

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Here’s a quick list of websites I use to teach 3rd graders how to write (check here for updates):

1. Adventure Island
2. Character Trading Cards
3. Context Clues Game
4. Context Clues Millionaire
5. Friendly Letter Maker
6. Identify the Main Idea
7. Main Idea Battleship
8. Using a table of contents
9. Words in Context

This isn’t robust enough. Please add a comment with websites you’ve found valuable in teaching the techniques of writing to third graders.

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My school is an IB school. We follow the philosophy that to educate students requires an international understanding of the world, people and ideas. Part of the curriculum requires fifth graders to participate in an Exhibition where they use knowledge accumulated over six years of education to communicate their ideas on a global issue such as displacement, global warming, lack of education, pollution, world hunger, and limited access to fresh, clean water.

Last year, the fifth grade team asked me to brush students up on Publisher/PowerPoint/Word skills so they could construct their presentation. This year, I’m taking a different approach by encouraging students to think of other ways than these traditional ways to communicate their ideas. We’re spending six weeks studying and teaching each other some of the amazing online communication tools that offer motivating and inspirational ways to share thoughts.

Here’s how we’re doing that:

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Every year, third graders in my school study landforms. Here’s a pithy list of websites I’ve collected to complement this study (click here for updates to list).

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Every Friday, I’ll send you a wonderful website (or more) that my classes and my

parents love. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of your students as they are of mine.

My fourth graders just went through a unit of inquiry on natural disasters and we came up with a pretty good list of resources. I want to share them with you. Please add your own to the comment section:

1. Avalanches
2. Earthquake simulations
3. Earthquakes
4. Earthquakes for Kids
5. Earthquakes–USGS
6. Hurricanes
7. Natural disaster videos
8. Natural disasters—National Geographic
9. Natural disasters–resources
10. Savage Earth
11. Storm Chasing
12. Tornadoes
13. Tornadoes II
14. Tsunamis
15. Volcano Underwater
16. Volcano videos
17. Volcanoes

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Every Friday, I’ll send you a wonderful website (or more) that my classes and my parents love. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of your students as they are of mine.

Here’s a long list of Language Arts and Word Study websites for 3rd grade. I’m sure they’re fine for 4th and 5th, also. You decide, depending upon what your students are working on (check for updates).

1. BBC Phonics
2. BiteSize—Reading, Writing, Grammar
3. Blends
4. Common/Proper Noun Basketball
5. Contraction Games
6. Contraction Crossword
7. Contraction Practice
8. Create a picture with words
9. Feast of Homonyms
10. Flamingo Suffixes
11. Funny Poetry
12. Glossary of Poetry Terms
13. Grammar Gorillas
14. Grammaropolis
15. Instant Poetry—fill in the blanks
16. Jelly Fish
17. Katie’s Clubhouse
18. Opposites Train Game
19. Parts of speech poetry
20. The Patchworker
21. Pick a Word
22. Plural Nouns
23. Poetry with a Porpoise
24. Poetry Engine
25. Prefix Catch
26. Prefix Match
27. Prefix Suffix Balloon Game
28. Punctuation and Capitalization
29. Punctuation Games
30. Sam’s Lab
31. Shaped Poems–fun
32. Short Vowels
33. Suffix Match
34. Synonym or Antonym?
35. Third Grade Poems
36. Vocabulary Flood
37. Vocabulary Pinball
38. Web-based Mad Libs
39. Word Balloons
40. Word Family Sort
41. Word Magnets
42. Word Play
43. Word Pond

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This infographic from Open Site–Free Internet Encyclopedia came as a huge surprise to me. I, like many teachers I know, warn students against relying on Wikipedia as a primary source for research. Imagine my surprise when I read the information below, on the heals of Britannica ending publication of their renowned and historic encyclopedia.

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