Websites

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As implied in its name, this website is a great resource for teaching writing. Sponsored by the Northern Nevada Writing Project, this site provides teachers with a wealth of information and insight about teaching writing as well as numerous lesson plans and teaching ideas. 

 

TED stands for technology, entertainment, and design. It started out as a small nonprofit committed to gathering remarkable people to share remarkable ideas. It has grown and now extends into many disciplines to gather great minds and speakers from all walks of life. This site is filled with inspiring and thought provoking videos, most 20 minutes or less in length. This is a great site to spark philosophical and analytical thinking that will help you reflect on your own teaching practices. 

 

If you teach reading and writing, you should be a member of NCTE! Membership has some great perks but mostly it comes with a monthly subscription of Language Arts a great professional journal that shares some of the most up-to-date research on reading and writing instruction.

 

Every committed reading and writing teacher should be a member of the International Reading Association. This site gives you access to The Reading Teacher online as well as mission statements and other articles that will prompt thoughtful reflection about good teaching practices in literacy. 

 

Choice Literacy is committed to making teaching reading and writing do-able. Membership entitles you to hundreds of videos and articles that will help you learn HOW to implement good teaching practices in your reading and writing classroom. If you choose not to subscribe, do not skip subscribing to The Big Fresh, Brenda Power’s weekly newsletter. It’s free and ALWAYS worth reading. 

 

This site is comprehensive, but from a literacy standpoint, it has great information and most importantly, free videos to watch and help you reflect on your own classroom practices. 

 

Reading Rockets is a national multimedia project offering information and resources on how young kids learn to read, why so many struggle, and how caring adults can help. It is filled with outstanding information that will help teachers learn about what helps children become more proficient readers.

 

www.francesmcgarry.com
A teacher's teacher with a flair for the dramatic:  Fran McGarry is a new blogger with a fresh voice about the authentic teaching or writing.

www.twowritingteachers.wordpress.com

Ruth Ayers and Stacey Shubitz live 565 miles apart, yet they blog together and have co-authored a book about teaching writing being published by Stenhouse that will be released in the fall of 2010. Wholeheartedly committed to providing great writing instruction, they use their blog to reflect on their practices and share their ideas. Definitely worth visiting often!

 

Anastasia Suen blogs about 12-15 children’s book per week. Her blog and website are a great resource for building your own knowledge about children’s literature.

 

Debbie Diller is the queen of photos that teach teachers. Her blog is fun and thoughtful. 

 

Franki Sibberson author of Beyond Leveled Books , Still Learning to Read , and Day-to-Day Assessment in the Reading Workshop and Mary Lee Hahn, author of Reconsidering Read-Aloud (all Amazon affiliate links), team up to write this great blog which is mostly about children’s literature but occasionally about their own learning lives.   Franki works as a library media specialist but is a former elementary classroom teacher and Mary Lee is a fourth grade teacher. Their thoughts and work are truly inspiring and will definitely help you to reflect on your own teaching.

 

 

 

The two teachers who blog together yet live 565 miles apart come together on this site to provide many different resources that help make their writing instruction effective. Filled with checklists, rubrics, touchstone texts, and lesson ideas, this site is a great resource for any committed writing workshop teacher. 

 

This is a very beautiful site with great recommendations about using children’s literature in the classroom. Essentially, it is an online magazine for teachers with a real interest in integrating art into their reading and writing instruction. 

 

Spearheaded by Ruth Shagoury and her daughter Meghan Rose, this website is a resource for finding great children’s literature recommendations and ideas for using these books. 

 

The newest version of Angela Watson Powell’s contribution to the web, this site offers great insight and teaching ideas about everything education. Love the photos and reflection.

 

Carefully chosen words are art and that is why wordle is so much fun. Input a text and this site filters out the most important words and arranges them into a beautiful word cloud. 

 

 

This website, founded by James Paterson, is filled with children’s literature reviews and recommendations. Its intent is simple: to help parents and educators connect children with books that will help to turn them into lifelong readers. Not yet as comprehensive as it could be, it shows tremendous promise and is super user friendly. 

 

This is a great compilation of reading strategies that you might consider using with your students. Suggested strategies are appropriate for a wide range of grade levels. 

  

www.wallwisher.com is a wonderful, free web 2.0 resource. We love it as a collaboration tool and a way of making learning interesting and fun. To show you how these walls can be used in the reading and writing classroom, we have started some“walls” here that we invite and encourage you to add to!