A Collection of Wonderful Websites: Everything but the kitchen sink!

Literacy

I hope to get a lot of use out of this magical,

inspirational and innovative website next year.

The Literacy Shed

The Literacy Shed

These are other useful websites for literacy

and contain online books to listen to and to read.

We Give Books

Storyline Online

Zingertales

Tumblebooks

 

Picture books:

A number of stories about a dinosaur

Short stories on Learn English Kids British Council

CBeebies: Picture Stories for Infant Classes

 

Animated books (no reading involved!

Would be good for oral comprehension

perhaps to end of First Class) @ We do listen

 

Comprehension will be a focus of this school year.

Inference is a useful skill.

Here are fifteen riddles that require the student to infer:

http://www.philtulga.com/Riddles.html

 

Prediction is another skill which assists comprehension.

This visual puzzle gives students the opportunity to predict.

http://www.philtulga.com/Prediction.html

You will see that the excellent website  

from which these two activities come from

has all sorts of other original ideas for

the teaching of reading, maths, science and music. 

 

Maths

This is a good site for literacy and maths:

Oxford Owls

 

Sumdog comes highly recommended for learning maths.

One has to register to join.

Link to Sumdog

 

One has to register to get the best from this site too.  

The content is cross curricular but this is a maths index for children aged 7-9

TES iboard.co maths 7-9

 

These are the strategies we are learning

to speed up our understanding of this computation.

Strategies for Learning Tables

 

The following is a site where the children can practice

computation, which tracks individual progress

ADDieMath.com

 

Problem Solving

Recently in school we talked very briefly about this problem.

Perhaps the children would like to experiment with solutions at home:

The River Crossing

 

Pokemon

For fans of Pokemon:

This activity involves reading, comprehension and decision making:

A Pokemon Adventure from Woodlands Junior Kent

The Arts

Here are some useful suggestions for integrating art and drama:

Games that integrate art and drama

These ideas are from a great art blog that I discovered recently

Drydenart.weebly.com

The author is a specialist art teacher, teaching at primary level in the US.

The standard she is reaching with the children is exceptional.

Reading quickly through her philosophy it appears that she would prefer

five fully finished masterpieces from a child over a year

rather than a weekly unfinished one.

 

Included in this blog are a series of short videos (on Vimeo)

for use in class.

‘White Spot Inspector’ is an inventive approach

to getting the children not to leave spaces in the picture unfinished.

Other videos include advice about

sketching lightly with a pencil instead of digging down onto the page,

being kind to paintbrushes and glue pots,

concentrating,

being neat,

avoiding careless brushwork

and using black marker to tidy up untidy paintwork.

There is also one on craftmanship i.e. touching up your work, ‘redrafting’ etc.

Index of Instructional Art Videos

There is also a link to an extensive archive of artwork.

Art Archive

I would be doing this wonderful blogger a disservice

if I didn’t mention that she also uses a lot of IT in her work.

This is presently beyond me, but it is something to be inspired by and to aspire to.

 

25th August 2012:

I have been adding to this post all summer.

As a result it seems to contain everything but the kitchen sink.

Here are some more!

They are classroom tools for timing/counting down and picking names:

Countdown Timer

Dartboard Student Selector

Fruit Machine Word or Name Picker

Picking A Name Out Of A Hat