Stellar Speller

Another CandleLight Stories favorite, this Stellar Speller game helps kids practice basic spelling words. An image is displayed in the astronaut's helmet, there are underscores to indicate the number of letters that make up the word, and the student types in using the on-screen keyboard.

Book Wizard

Check out the Teacher Book Wizard from Scholastic.com




Simply enter in the name of a book or an author and find out more information about the book/author, reading levels, lesson plans and discussion guides. Why don't you give it a try by entering in 'Corduroy' which is the book we are reading for 'Read for the Record'.

Stately Knowledge

The Stately Knowledge website was created by the Internet Public Library. Click on any of the fifty states to find pertinent facts and information for your research projects on the fifty American states. Students can create travel brochures, or a "Did You Know?" fact booklet to share with the class. You might want to try making a mix and match game to really test student knowledge, where certain vital facts are selected from a game card file (created by you or your students) and the student teams must match them up to the correct state within a set time.

Curious George

We all know and love the Curious George character. Now you can visit Curious George's website at PBS.com. Parents and Teachers should visit the link along the top and then click on the link 'Guide to Web Features for Kids' to find out more about each of the various games on the website. There are also printables that can be printed out and colored. The games and video clips focus on math and science.

Assessment Tools for Emergent Readers

The Los Angeles County Office of Education's 'Teams Educational Resources' has a website that has a host of assessment tools for emergent readers. You will find these assessment sheets extremely useful for ready-to-go tools on phonemes, with isolation and matching exercises for students. Included are beginning sounds, final sounds, blending, rhyme, phoneme segmentation, and more. Tests on spelling inventories monitor word knowledge, while learning records for both reading and writing K-3 are also included.

Scholastic's Teacher Book Wizard

Check out Scholastic's Teacher Book Wizard to help you find books for your students. If you choose the 'BookAlike' (yes, that is one word! LOL) option and pick a topic of interest to them, type it in the search field, select whether you want similar books to be below, at, or above a reading level, click search, and VOILA -- a list of books to choose from. Choose the 'Quick Search' option to find a specific book, an author's works, or book subject by keyword. Select the 'Leveled Search' and get even more specific. There is even an option to choose books by Lexile numbers.

Parents CAN Help!

Was just notified of a wonderful (read ***FREE***) resource for parents to use to help their child with school. It's the Thinkfinity Parent Resources, an exciting collection of online educational resources. Choose any of the subjects below to browse our resources to help students with their homework, provide opportunities for extra practice and skill-building, engage their creativity and much more! This collection will continue to grow, so check back often.

Free-Reading.net

Designed by a New York-based educational start-up, Wireless Generation, the reading program for kindergartners and first-graders allows teachers to post their own lessons, comments and modifications in what the company says is a “wiki” application. The site even looks like Wikipedia.

This is the same person who turned the DIBELS reading test into a money making venture.

Check it out at Free-Reading.net

Read the entire blurb at The Apple, a website I'll be posting about soon.

Snakes and Ladders

BBC.com out of the United Kingdom produces a number of wonderful online activities. My favorite is a game of ‘Snakes and Ladders’ which you can play with a friend or by yourself. Watch the die roll itself when you click on it, then move the red markers the correct number of squares (if you don’t, the marker goes back to the square it was on).