Posted on : 07-04-2011 | By : InteractiveEducator | In : Poetry
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In honor of national poetry month, here are five sites for creating masterpieces with magnetic poetry.
Classroom Applications:
Magnetic poetry can be a wonderful tool to encourage students to begin exploring poetry who may be reluctant writers or who just aren’t interested in the genre. Sometimes it is helpful for students who have trouble getting started or making decisions to have a closed set of words to work with. And magnetic poetry can expand a student’s writing by providing word choice options that may not be part of his/her everyday vocabulary. Furthermore, simply using technology is often a motivational tool.
If students are working with the same set of words, having students share their poetry can provide an opportunity to compare and contrast and can inspire a discussion of word choice.
While magnetic poetry is not a substitute for writing a poem from scratch, it can be a tool to gain student interest in the genre and to encourage guided exploration of the craft.
Posted on : 13-01-2010 | By : InteractiveEducator | In : 3-6 Reading
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This post was inspired by Susanna’s post at Living-Learners about using comics in the classroom:
http://livinglearners.blogspot.com/2010/01/using-comics-in-classroom-and-have-your.html
The websites:
Classroom Applications:
Creating online comics is a great way to have your students apply their knowledge of reading concepts to a project they can share with others.
1. Challenge your students to summarize a story they have read in a comic. Use the three panel form as a “beginning, middle, end” summary format.
Posted on : 04-01-2010 | By : InteractiveEducator | In : 3-6 Reading, K-2 Reading
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The website:
I first learned of this site on www.ilearntechnology.com and was excited about the potential applications for classrooms. Read The Words allows users to paste text into a box, and choose one of fifteen virtual readers to read the text aloud. (Note: Each reader has a unique voice and some have accents or speak in other languages.)
You can control the reader’s speed and pitch, and the audio can be listened to online, downloaded to an mp3 player, or posted on a website. In approximately one minute, you can generate an hour long recording!
With the appearance of quality online virtual manipulatives, many traditionally paper and pencil activities have become opportunities to engage students with technology, as is the case with the following website.
Classroom Integration Ideas:
Students can create a printable flip book to demonstrate their understanding of multiple concepts. Here are a few examples:
Cause and Effect
Direct your students to create a flip book with alternating pages of causes and effects. Have them share their books with each other and turn the sharing into a prediction exercise. Have the student being presented to brainstorm potential effects from each cause in their partner’s book before flipping the page to see their partner’s chosen effect.
My discovery of this website led to the creation of one of my favorite figurative language lessons. I began our class discussion of onomatopoeias by reading aloud the picture book: Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears by Verna Ardema. We would list the onomatopoetic words (“sound effect words” as I started out calling them) on the board as I read the book. At the book’s conclusion, we would discuss the word list as a class, and the students would share their ideas about what they thought the words had in common. Finally, I would explain that each word was onomatopoetic. We would brainstorm additional onomatopoetic words together. Then, to move the learning beyond basic recognition and to deepen their understanding of the concept, I would use the website below.
The website:
Classroom Applications:
1. Extension Activity: I challenged my students to create their own onomatopoetic words to accurately describe each sound in this teaching tool. Because this is a very difficult activity for some students, I found that working in groups or partners was most successful as long as each group could share more than one idea. As the groups shared their words, we would replay the sound file and discuss as a class how closely their creations mimicked the real sounds.
