Kaiako

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Looking into books online

Children's Storybooks Online some books with gorgeous illustrations, some can even have audio attached

Big Universe - selection of books including some in different languages - but you have to purchase a membership :-(

Tumble Books Online - some fun stories here!

International children's digital library

Storylineonline - books read by actors

Clifford the big red dog

Mightybooks

First Day Ideas

Class Quilt - individual portraits making up a whole class quilt

Back to school puzzle - make a memory game from the children's photos

Find the gingerbread persons - finding places and meeting people around school

My favourite things - creating a life sized portrait

End of year powerpoint - start collecting the photos now!

Kid pix portrait book

learning names - use a beat!

Rainbow fish

And, because Waitangi day is coming up....links to creating a class 'treaty'.

An Australian site

Treaty of Waitangi

TKI Treaty of Waitangi links

more learning games

Primary games - created by a teacher - some typing practice as well as literacy, numeracy etc.

ICT games - literacy & numeracy games aimed at emerging readers & writers.

Woodlands Literacy Zone - Words and spelling, across many levels.

PBS Kids - lots of fun stuff here

Mums inspire learning - some non-computer games! Have you played a board game lately?

Read, write and think - I need to look deeper into the options on this page. Pleased to see 'thinking' included.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

RPS has the Key Links series by Jill Eggleton. I am exploring the ideas in this series for my reading programme with a Year 1 Class this year. I like how she has suggested independent experiences where children move through individually rather than with their 'group'. This makes room for some buddy type opportunities where children can learn from each other, support each other and consolidate their learning by sharing what they know/understand with other children. I have normally worked on a 'group' basis for independent experiences so this will be an exciting trial!

I loved hearing Jill's passion for reading and readers and her idea of shared reading being the heart and soul of a good reading programme and that a good shared reading book should be musical, magical and rhythmical. I'm looking forward to our first shared book of 'Bad Luck Duck'. There are some video's on both shared and guided reading on this site as well as a video on the Key Links in general - click on the video bit on the page to view the videos.

There seems to be an ease of use with teaching and learning guides as well as a classroom to home link on each page to support the home and school partnership by guiding parents in reading the book with their young readers.

When I did my google search for the 'key links' a BBC 'bitesize' link appeared. On checking this out I can see lots of options in using this in the teaching and learning over the next few weeks also. Each 'game' is followed by a worksheet response in .pdf format. I won't be using the worksheets in the traditional sense but perhaps as a group we will explore it on the activboards or have these options on the student laptops.

Another one is the CBeebies, also on the BBC site where Animal ABC has a cool musical phonological awareness game that students can work through.

Now as for the apple iPad - that looks like one seriously fun toy - completely doing away with the need for a 'net book' as you can do it all on a single 'tablet'! just like my iPod only bigger. The apps would be so much better bigger!