Teach the Children Well

More About Kindergarten

2012-01-19T14:04:00.002-05:00

I successfully used the tizmos page with my students for a while, but there were a couple of issues with it. First of all, more and more of the links were not coming up with screenshots and instead had a message that due to increased traffic, there would be a delay. Well, after several weeks, the message would still be there! It kind of defeated the purpose of visual links.

The straw that broke the camel's back, however was that I read a post on Elementary Tech Teachers ning saying that tizmos was down because it had been hacked. Since I needed something for my kindergarten classes right away, I did some searching and found Only2Clicks. I found that it had a similar graphic interface and also had tabs, a feature that was not available on tizmos. The only problem was that it seemed at first that I had to enter the user name and password in order to get to the page, which was not a good solution for sharing with others. The other downside was that gave the students full editing capability, with one of them inadvertently deleting one of the links. After some searching around, I found that there is a URL to give out for a public page. I changed all of the favorite places in the bookmarks bar to the new link, both in the lab and in the kindergarten classrooms.

I did have an issue still where the cursor seemed to get stuck on one thumbnail, making it difficult to use the page. I contacted the developer and the problem was fixed within 24 hours.

Here is my Only2Clicks page. I add to it whenever I see the students. I use the tabs to separate the everyday links from the more distracting holiday links.

Kindergarten

2011-11-06T07:30:00.002-05:00

I am seeing more kindergarten students on a regular basis this year. Over the years, we have become much less software based and much more web focused. Although I have many good sites for this age on my Early Learning page, the trick is to get the kids to the sites. My solution is to create a tizmo for them, which is much more visually based.

Some of my favorite sites for this age are:

Bembo's Zoo, an alphabet site that morphs an animal word into the shape of that animal
Starfall, a site where children can learn the alphabet as well as a very well done phonics based reading program
Literacy Center, a place to practice skills with upper and lowercase letters, numbers, colors, and shapes
Building Language for Literacy, a Scholastic site with three different activities, initial consonants, sorting words based on location, and rhyming words
Count Us In, a math site with fifteen activities covering counting skills, patterns, basic addition and subtraction as well as others

My Own Content

2011-09-11T15:14:00.000-04:00

Although most of the links on Teach the Children Well are to content provided by others, I would like to highlight content that I have created myself.

On the Math page, under the Addition and Subtraction topic is Fact Family Village which is an interactive site of addition and subtraction fact families from zero to ten.

In the Fractions topic is a grid of fraction links that is designed for students to self-differentiate based on interest, learning style, and ability. It is called Fantastic Fractions.

On the Social Studies page, under the Massachusetts topic are two different formats of the same questions about Massachusetts' Role in the American Revolution. The first is an online crossword puzzle with clues that link to information. The second is a printable set of questions to be used with online questions with links to information.

There are several more links on the Social Studies page. In the Cape Cod topic is Cape Cod Photo Album, pictures from every town on the Cape. Also under that topic is Children's Theatre, a schedule of theatre productions on Cape Cod and within reasonable driving distance. There is a second link to that page under the Theatre topic of the Arts page. In the Elections topic is Electing the President of the United States, a printable set of questions with links that I created for the 2008 election and which I will update as needed for the 2012 election. Under Europe is European Photo Album which includes pictures and information from a vacation that I took with my family in 2000 as well as pictures my daughter took on subsequent trips.

The Other Topics page includes another crossword puzzle that I created called Winter Holiday Customs. This is found near the bottom of the Holidays topic. I have included religious and secular holidays from various faiths and cultures. On this same page are two specialized pages of links to online activities for the 100th Day of School and Gingerbread.

September 11

2011-09-03T09:23:00.000-04:00

All adults remember exactly where they were and what they were doing on September 11, 2001. I had the impression of watching a bad science fiction movie. If only it had been fiction!

Most of my students were not even alive yet, but their lives are surely effected by this event. Students who are currently in the fourth grade were born in 2001 or 2002.

Here are some resources that I have found that are related to 9/11:

9/11/2001: The Day That Changed America from Scholastic
9/11 Attacks - 102 Minutes That Changed America from The History Channel

The National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum


OurStory from Smithsonian

The September 11 Digital Archive

Today in History: September 11 from the Library of CongressSeptember 11, 2001 News Archives