Phonics – Page 2 – iLearn Technology

57 Ways to Celebrate National Literacy Day

September 8, 2010Kelly Tenkely8 Comments9282 views

Did you know that today is National Literacy Day? It is! I think that literacy is something to celebrate, being literate is a gift I enjoy every day but don’t stop to appreciate nearly enough. In honor of National Literacy Day, I thought I would share my favorite technology enhanced literacy tools. In no particular order, here are my favorite ways to celebrate literacy. What are your favorites?

1. Save the Words– an excellent site that values language, vocabulary, and words.

2. Grammaropolis– an enchanting site that teaches students parts of speech through character and story.

3. Signed Stories– an online story collection accompanied by British Sign Language, pictures, and sound.

4. Learn Direct– where students can be the star in their own online storybook.

5. Inkless Tales– a literacy website with a beautiful mission statement “You can do anything. Try, try again. Don’t give up. Experiment. Write, draw, explore and more.”

6. Storybird- a beautiful collaborative storytelling website.

7. My English Images– images that illustrate difficult vocabulary and language concepts.

8. Lexipedia– a visual dictionary and thesaurus.

9. Tikatok– Students become published authors with Tikatok

10. Free Reading– an open source instructional program to help you teach early literacy.

11. Word World– a great site for kindergarten and first grade letter and word recognition.

12. Reading Rockets– free reading guides for teachers to improve reading achievement of kids.

13. Super Why! – a site that helps kids gain important foundational reading skills such as alphabet, word families, spelling, comprehension, and vocabulary.

14. Get Ready to Read!– a great site that helps teachers equip children with the basic skills necessary for learning to read.

15. Roy the Zebra– Excellent site for emerging readers.

16. Fable Vision– the beautiful virtual town filled with stories and games.

17. Kidoons– brings time honored tales from the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Thorton Burgess, and more to life.

18. GameGoo– fun educational games that help students develop reading and language skills.

19. Read Write Think– a collection of online student resources that support literacy learning k-12.

20. Seussville– the wonderful world of Dr. Seuss brought to life.

21. Digital Booktalk– book trailers that will whet your students appetite for a good book.

22. Storybook Web– a website based on popular children’s stories where students can listen to author’s reading excerpts.

23. Mee Genius– where students can read books, personalize them, and share them with a friend.

24. Stage’d- a tool that helps students tell stories digitally.

25. Kerpoof– where students can create their own storybooks, comics, and movies.

26. Lightning Bug– “your writing partner, helping you write a story from beginning to THE END.”

27. ePubBud– for publishing your very own ebooks.

28. Magic Treehouse- a wonderful website where students can engage in the popular book series.

29. The Stacks– a wonderful creation by Scholastic that excites students about reading.

30. The World of Peter Rabbit– an absolutely captivating site based on the work of Beatrix Potter.

31. My Hippo Has the Hiccups– a free poetry ebook by Kenn Nesbitt.

32. Weboword– a visual vocabulary site.

33. N ational Geographic Young Explorer– non-fiction for the primary classroom from National Geographic.

34. Online Audio Stories- an impressive collection of free audio stories.

35. Story Nory– another collection of free audio books for kids.

36. Skratch Track– a virtual bookshelf for primary students.

37. Picture Book Maker– a place for students to create picture books.

38. Story Cove– a collection of stories from around the world.

39. Skype an Author Network– connects teachers, students, and authors over Skype.

40. Word Ahead Vocabulary Videos– animated vocabulary videos.

41. My Story Maker– a website where students are in charge of the interactive story.

42. Book Wink– an incredible site that motivates students to read through podcasts and web video.

43. Scholastic Story Starters– a tool that generates writing ideas.

44. Telescopic Text– a site that expands a sentence to demonstrate descriptive writing.

45. The Tale of Despereaux Adventure- a beautiful interactive story book.

46. Literactive- leveled guided readers, comprehensive phonics activities, and supplemental reading material.

47. Pic Lits- a creative writing site based on pictures.

48. Speakaboos– a collection of online stories and ebooks.

49. Animailia– a site based on the popular book by Graeme Base.

50. Mrs. P’s Magic Library– an absolutely enchanting site that celebrates books and reading.

51. Free Rice– practice vocabulary while helping others fight hunger.

52. Shelfari– a virtual bookshelf.

53. Read to Feed- Heifer International reading project for kids.

54. Into the Book– an outstanding site that teaches reading strategies for comprehension.

55. Google Lit Trips– exploring literature using Google Earth.

56. Starfall– a must see website for phonics.

57. Book Adventure– a free reading motivation program.

But the very best way to celebrate National Literacy Day…read a book!

Sharendipity

August 5, 2010August 5, 2010Kelly Tenkely2 Comments3058 views

What it is: Sharendipity is an excellent online tool that lets you easily create your own learning and educational game. You can do this by using one of the Sharendipity ready-made templates, or you can create a game from scratch. There just isn’t always a quality game for students to practice with when you need one. I know I have found myself wishing that I could find a game focusing on the exact phonic skill or a game that used the vocabulary that we were working on in class. Often those tailor-made games just don’t exist. Sharendipity is the answer, making it simple to create your own custom games. Games are a fun way for students to practice a new skill and they make a great quick center activity on classroom computers.

How to integrate Sharendipity into your curriculum: Create games that are tailored to your students learning needs. Sharendipity makes it easy enough to create fun games, you can create one in the time it would take you to make copies of worksheets. Use one of the ready-made templates for the easiest game creation, or if you are feeling brave, start from scratch and make your own. You can upload all of your own images to Sharendipity making customization really easy. Consider using pictures of your class, school, or students as the background of a game. Your students are sure to love seeing familiar faces or landmarks as part of the game. These games are great for fact practice and recall in math, vocabulary, spelling, phonics, or geography where quick recall of the basics is key. Sharendipity will walk you through each step of the game making process and when you are finished, you can share the url or embed the game in a class website. If your students are a little older, they can make their own Sharendipity games to practice with. Students can create games for their classmates to play as a way to study. I have students who were constantly creating games and practice activities for my classroom; they got really good at it! If you are teaching in a computer lab, Sharendipity is a fun way for students to create “original” content for their wiki, blog, or website. At my school, we buddy up older grade level students with younger grade level students. It was fun for the older kids to create special games for their buddies after learning about their buddies favorite things. For example, one student found out that their buddy loved basketball and created a basketball themed spelling activity for them.

If you collaborate with another class or another school, it would be neat to swap customized games with them.

Tips: If you are braving creating your own game, be sure to check out Sherendipity’s learning center for a great guide on how to use the tools.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Sharendipity in your classroom!

DragON Tape

August 4, 2010Kelly Tenkely4 Comments3913 views

What it is: DragON Tape is a web application that lets you create video “mix tapes” (mashups) of YouTube Videos. DragoON Tape is really simple to use, just search for a video by YouTube URL or subject and drag it down to the timeline. Add as many videos to the timeline as you want and save it. DragON Tape makes it easy to give your students access to several videos with just one url.

How to integrate DragON Tape into your curriculum: DragON Tape is a simple way for you to create a mix of videos for your students to watch, collected under one url. DragON Tape is very easy to use and share, you can create a video mashup in no time. This is a great way to send video collections to students and colleagues. If you have access to YouTube at school, students could create their own DragON Tape mixes on any subject. Students can mix the best of the best videos on a subject to share with classmates. This year, I had my students make video commercials advertising Free Rice that we uploaded to YouTube. DragON Tape would be a fantastic way to collect all of the student videos in one url so that students and parents could watch the student creations in one place. DragON Tape is easy to fast forward and rewind through making it perfect for this type of class video collection. Want to see DragON Tape in action? Check out this phonics mix I made in under 2 min! Another thing that I like about DragON Tape is the way that it isolates YouTube videos against a black screen when it replays them. There are no distracting comments, advertisements, or related videos suggested. DragON is perfect for the projector-connected computer, interactive whiteboard, or on computer lab or classroom computers as part of a guided learning activity.

Tips: DragON Tape requires an email for registration. If students are creating mixes, consider creating and using a class email address as the login credentials or used a @tempinbox or @mailinator temporary inbox address.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using DragON Tape in your classroom!

Treasures MacMillan McGraw Hill Supplement

August 3, 2010August 3, 2010Kelly Tenkely15 Comments5318 views

I am not a fan of canned curriculum. It has some benefits and is relatively easy to teach, but there is a lack of differentiation for different learners and the activities for practice are often shallow. Treasures has some fun stories and themes but they are really lacking in their activities to practice the essential learning. The activities are often shallow and don’t change from first grade to fifth grade. The same copy from the dictionary activity is suggested for learning vocabulary for every unit in every grade level. I created the Treasures supplement as a way to help teachers provide students with multiple ways of practicing the essential learnings. I just finished the supplement for unit 1. This is the supplement for first through fifth grade.

Open publication – Free publishing – More treasures

Answer Garden

July 26, 2010Kelly Tenkely9 Comments5177 views

What it is: I learned about Answer Garden from an interactive post on Suzanne Whitlow’s excellent blog, Suzanne’s Blog. Answer Garden is a “new minimalistic feedback tool.” It can be used as an online answer collection tool or embedded on a website or blog. An Answer Garden is created as easily as entering a question and clicking create, no registration needed. Embed the Answer Garden on any blog, website, or social network page using the embed code provided. You can also give students a direct link to the Answer Garden. Students can post answers to your questions by entering their own answers or by clicking on and submitting existing answers. All of the answers are represented in the form of a word cloud. 25 answers are visible per garden but as students submit the same answer, that word will grow bigger. Creating an Answer Garden is SO simple. Just type in your question or brainstorm statement and click create.

How to integrate Answer Garden into the classroom: Answer Garden is a fun way for students to brainstorm, plan, and work together. Pose open-ended thinking questions on your classroom blog or website for students to answers. Use Answer Garden to host a classroom poll. Create a geography Answer Garden that gives students a place that they can describe a state or country they are learning about. Use Answer Garden during reading as a place for students to reflect on different characters, plots, settings, and themes. In history, give students a date range, event, or historical figure and let them add words to the Answer Garden that describe. In the primary classroom, type in a phoneme combination and have students submit words that fit the phoneme rule. Create an answer garden to recognize VIP students in your classroom where each child can answer with a character quality that they appreciate about that student. The possibilities are endless! This tool is SO easy to use, try it out in the Answer Garden below.

Where will use Answer Garden?… at AnswerGarden.ch .

Tips: The default settings on Answer Garden only allows students to submit one answer. You can check the optional “Unlimited Answering” to give students multiple opportunities to submit answers.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Answer Garden in your classroom.

BBC: Magic Key

July 9, 2010Kelly Tenkely4 Comments2821 views

What it is: The BBC is a constant source of excellent classroom interactives and games. Today I ran across Magic Key while working on supplementing MacMillan Mcgraw Hill’s Treasures curriculum for first grade. Magic Key is based on a cartoon in the UK, even if your students aren’t familiar with the cartoon, they are sure to enjoy the website adventures. Magic Key has fun literacy games for kindergarten and first grade students. The games help students practice full stops (sentence endings), sentence order, questions, character characteristics, capital letters, seeing patterns, figuring out new words, descriptions, and words that make sounds. The games are age appropriate, include fun characters, and help students practice and understand important literacy skills. In each game, students enter an adventure where the goal is to collect the Magic Key.

How to integrate BBC: Magic Key into the classroom: The Magic Key games are short and sweet, they give students the opportunity to practice new skills independently. I like to use games like these as a center activity. These types of short games make a great center because they provide students with immediate feedback and are self leveling. Set Magic Key up on your classroom computers as a literacy center for students to visit independently or in small groups. Don’t forget that the interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer can also be a center station! These games are a great alternative to the worksheet (you didn’t really want to grade one of those anyway) and will provide your students with an opportunity to practice what they are learning.

Tips: Check out the teacher section of Magic Key for a description of each game, the curriculum tie in, and (I hesitate to mention) worksheets.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using BBC: Magic Key in your classroom.

Edistorm

May 18, 2010May 18, 2010Kelly Tenkely5 Comments4441 views

What it is: The name Edistorm is a mash-up of the name Thomas Edison and brainstorm, it is inspired by Edison’s idea factories. Edistorm is an incredible brainstorming and collaboration tool that, on the surface, reminds me of Wallwisher. Edistorm has some additional features and abilities that make it very useful in the classroom. Just like Wallwisher, you brainstorm and collaborate using virtual sticky notes. Edistorm gives you a place to organize ideas in a real-time interactive wall. Virtual sticky notes can teach have their own color and can be organized in vertical or horizontal groupings. Edistorms can be created independently or with others in a collaborative effort. Edistorm features an idea bot that works at the bottom of the screen offering suggested ideas based on what students add to the sticky notes in the work space. There are a variety of bots including a rhyming bot, thesaurus, and related words. Public and solo Edistorms are free to create, premium accounts are available for private Edistorms.

How to integrate Edistorm into the classroom: Edistorm offers an exceptional opportunity for students to brainstorm, collaborate, and group ideas. Students can use Edistorm to brainstorm ideas for writing, research, for grouping ideas, and collaborating on group projects. Create an Edistorm for your students and ask them to group like ideas, sort, and expand on thoughts. This could be done for any historical event, literature, science concept, and even phonics. Students could practice spelling by typing out their spelling words along with a sentence or synonyms on sticky notes. Then, they can group words by spelling pattern or common phoneme blends. Create an Edistorm of sticky notes with English words and sticky notes with a foreign language word on them. Students can work together to group words with their meanings. In math, create Edistorms with word problems on one color of sticky note and answers on another set of sticky notes. Students can work to create groups of problems and their solutions. Edistorm can be used for whole class activities using an interactive whiteboard, the class can brainstorm together and collect ideas or use the grouping feature in an activity created by the teacher or students.

Tips: Edistorm requires an email address for sign up. If you teach younger students, you may want to create classroom Edistorm sessions that you have control over.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Edistorm in your classroom.

Treasures Reading Supplement

February 16, 2010Kelly Tenkely26 Comments5560 views

What it is: We use the Treasures Reading curriculum (Macmillan McGraw Hill) at the school where I teach. Although there are things I like about this curriculum, one thing that is in need of improvement are the activities provided for students to practice the skills that they are learning. The activities don’t change from 1st-5th grade, are very repetitive, and do not encourage any sort of deeper thinking skills. In an attempt to remedy this for our students, I went through each unit for 1st through 5th grade and pulled out the essential learning components. I found activities that were engaging and required some deeper thinking to supplement what was currently in the curriculum. As I worked to supplement the activities, I looked for a few things: 1. The activity could be completed with the whole class, using an interactive whiteboard or projector, or could be completed as a computer center (for the classroom with 2 or 3 computers). 2. The activities had to meet and reinforce the essential learning. 3. The activities had to be more engaging than what was already suggested.

How to integrate Treasures Reading Supplement into the classroom: These guides are meant to be a supplement for the Treasures Reading Curriculum. They are designed to offer some extra ideas for helping students to practice and solidify learning. You will find a few activities that are meant for offline use such as a whole class bingo game or partner matching games. You will also notice some suggestions for Promethean activities. I created some supplemental flipcharts for our teachers to use that I am happy to share if you can use them. (I hope to have these up on Promethean Planet soon). Many of these activities can be completed as a center activity in the classroom. We don’t always have access to a computer lab of computers. In the classroom with a few computers, set up a weekly rotation so that your students can complete some of the online activities. Some of the games and activities are also appropriate for whole class participation.

In my classroom, I like to play games with my students. I will often split students into teams where the teams will take turns working through a game. Students love the extra layer of competition being timed.

In my reading classroom, I had literacy groups that I met with every day. Each day I met with a new group (those students who were in need of remedial reading met each day of the week). During literacy group time, the group that I was working with read the story for the week, learned and practiced key essential learning together (phonics, grammar, vocabulary) , and worked on building comprehension strategies. While I worked with my smaller literacy groups, the rest of the class worked through independent literacy centers. At the beginning of the week I explained all of the centers for the week. Because my classroom had limited space, I put my centers into colored tubs that rotated around the classroom. Each day a small group of students received a center tub. The tub has all of the necessary supplies and directions for that center. One of my centers always involved the classroom computers. Sometimes the centers were inquiry based, sometimes games, and sometimes additional reading practice. Every week, each student completed each center activity. In the meantime, I was able to work one on one with my literacy groups. This worked really well in my classroom and technology made it easy for students to work at their own level independently.

The guides are below in ebook format using Issuu, they have been separated by grade. Even if you don’t teach the Treasures Curriculum, everything has been arranged by the learning focus, these overlap in most curricula. You may find some great activities that meet your classroom need here:

First Grade:

Second Grade:

Third Grade:

Fourth Grade:

Fifth Grade:

*Note: The fourth and fifth grade spelling lists on Spelling City do not come from the Treasures curriculum. The fourth grade uses Houghton Mifflin and the fifth grade has generated their own lists.

For a list of all of my publications check out my library on Issuu.

Leave a comment and share how you are using the Treasures Reading Supplement in your classroom.

Rhyme Race

October 11, 2009Kelly Tenkely1 Comment1961 views

What it is: Rhyme Race is a four player (or four team) interactive rhyming game that helps promote a better understanding of rhyming. Players roll a die to move around the game board. Along the way, students are asked to come up with rhyming words. If the player lands on a spot of the same color as their game piece, they are given an audio rhyming word. A sound recording of a word is played and the player has to come up with a rhyming word. If the player lands on a purple space they are given a picture rhyme clue. A picture of a word is shown and the player must come up with a rhyming word. The first player (or team) to land on an end space wins.

How to integrate Rhyme Race into the classroom: Rhyme Race is an excellent interactive game for an interactive whiteboard. Split students into 4 teams, students in each team will rotate rolling the die and answering with a rhyme. This is also a great way for students to practice rhyming in small groups at a classroom computer as a center activity. If you have students who are struggling with rhyming, they can play this game as a single player.

Tips: Rhyme Race is a Flash game. Make sure that your Flash player is up-to-date before playing with students.

Related Resources: Little Animals Activity Centre, Rhymer

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Rhyme Race in your classroom.

Image Chef

July 21, 2009July 23, 2009Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment3416 views

What it is: Image Chef is a great little web tool that takes words and transforms them into a graphical image. Image Chef is similar in look to Wordle but works a little differently. In Wordle, the size of the word changes based on how frequently the word was used in the text. In Image Chef, the word size doesn’t change based on how frequently it is used in the text. Image Chef takes the words typed in a text box, and displays them in a word mosaic. Image Chef has a variety of shapes and symbols to choose from. Any text entered will be displayed in the shape selected. Registered users can also create their own shapes to display text graphically. Image Chef has the added bonus of graphically displaying text inside letters. The look of the image can be changed by adjusting font, text color, background color, and symbol or initial. Individual words can be highlighted by changing the color and clicking on a word in the mosaic. Word mosaics can be shared on blogs, emailed, printed, or saved on Image Chef.

How to integrate Image Chef into the classroom: Image Chef is a fun web tool for displaying words in new and interesting ways. My favorite feature of Image Chef is the ability to create word mosaics inside letters. This feature would be a good way for students to practice phonics. For example, students could create a letter “a” word mosaic filled with short a words (see my example above). Students could type blends inside of the blend letters, long and short vowel words, r-conrolled words, etc. These word mosaics could be printed out and bound into a phonics booklet for students, or displayed on a word wall. Image Chef mosaics would also be a great way for students to explore synonyms. Students can type synonyms into the text box and find or create an appropriate symbol to represent the words. Image Chef would make for a fun first week of school activity. Students could type in their initials as the shape for the word mosaic. In the text field, they can type in words that represent them. Print these out and display on a bulletin board next to student pictures. For older students, Image Chef could be used to create a large periodic table of elements. Choose the initials that represent the element on the periodic table and type the name of the element in the text box to fill the initials. Create a large periodic table for the classroom with the printed elements.

Tips: I learned about this awesome web tool from a tweet by @njtechteacher, definitely a teacher to follow this #teachertuesday! When you click on the Image Chef Link you will be taken to the Image Chef homepage (the site contains much more than just the word mosaic) To create a word mosaic click on “Word Mosaic” under “Create” in the left column of the website.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Image Chef in your classroom.