Integrating Technology in the Primary Classroom

Super Teacher Worksheets is a useful site for primary teachers that contains free, printable worksheets.

The worksheets are divided into the categories of

• maths
• reading and writing
• grammar and phonics
• spelling lists and worksheets
• puzzles and brainteasers
• holidays
• science and social studies
• teacher helpers

In each of the categories, there are activities suitable for a wide range of ages and abilities.

I have found some great activities for my grade two students especially for place value and reading comprehension.

Check out Super Teacher Worksheets and see what activities may suit your class!

Leave a comment. Do you use Super Teacher Worksheets or any other sites for ready-made resources?

StoryIt is a website that doesn’t look amazing with its simple layout and advertisements but has some great resources for the junior primary classroom.

While there are stories to read and print, seasonal resources, printable shapes and more – the resources I’ve found most useful are the word games.

There are about fifteen word games available to play online that involve making sentences, making words, spelling, changing words etc.

In the Wiz Game, the goal is to make as many words as you can from the letter tiles. Get the question mark tile to the bottom and a vocabulary question appears. Select the best meaning of the word and earn extra points.

The Odd One Out: Word Family game involves choosing the word that doesn’t belong.

There are games on the StoryIt site that would be suitable for students in at all levels of primary school.

These games could be used as a lesson introduction or closure on the IWB, with a small focus group or individual students could use the games on classroom computers.

Have you used the StoryIt Word Games?

How could you use these games in your classroom?

MeeGenius is a new site that has been popular on Twitter recently. MeeGenius is an online library of picture books for young children. Currently there are nearly 30 books available to read, most of which are popular fairy tales.

The books can be read independently or there is an option to hear the book being read to you with the words being highlighted as you hear them. If you choose the read along option, you can pause the books as they are read aloud. This is useful as it allows you to ask the students questions and focus on teaching points.

One of the most exciting features of this site is the ability to personalise the stories. This could be a great way to entice reluctant readers and a fun tool to make the stories more meaningful to your students. You simply answer a few questions and the book is rewritten to include new character names and locations etc. You can also click on the “edit” button to rewrite the whole book. This could be useful for creating “Fractured Fairy tales” with students.

You don’t need to sign up to read the MeeGenius stories, however you do need to sign-up if you wish to save and email your personalised stories.

These stories would be great on an IWB or classroom computers. While the site is completely free, you can buy MeeGenius Apps from the iTunes store for iPhones, iPod Touches or iPads (currently AU$2.49)

Leave a comment. How could you use MeeGenius in your classroom?

This year I have been team teaching with Kelly Jordan. Combining our two grade two classes has so many benefits and we are finding we are really meeting the needs of our students this year.

Our open plan classroom is a fantastic place to teach and learn!

Kelly has recently started a blog called Teaching Literacy in the Early Years. If you or someone you know teaches in the junior primary area you should definitely check this blog out.

Kelly posts about Literacy sites, ideas, thoughts, resources and strategies with others.

Drop by “Teaching Literacy in the Early Years” and leave Kelly a comment!

Smories is a website with short videos of children reading original stories for kids. There are 50 new Smories added every month. Writers are encouraged to submit their original children’s stories to be featured on the website.

The stories are advertised as being suitable for children aged three to eight although there are many stories that would also appeal to children older than eight.

There is a special version of Smories available for the iPhone, iPod Touch and there will soon be an iPad version.

I have been using this site with my Grade Two class as a means of modelling reading with expression and also as a comprehension activity. I have been encouraging the students to picture the story in their mind as they listen. Listening to Smories is also a good way to revise the features of a narrative.

My students have really enjoyed the stories and find it quite appealing to listen to children their own age.

Next time we do a story writing activity I am going to get my students to publish their work “Smory style” which we can then put on our class blog.

Do you have any other ideas of how you could integrate this site into your classroom?

Five Card Flickr is a simple yet useful tool that I found out about from a number of people on Twitter.

Five Card Flickr deals you random pictures from Flickr that you put together to tell a story. From each 5 photos you are dealt, you choose one to add to your story. You then repeat this 4 more times until you have 5 photos that you can then use to tell a story.

Students could use this tool for oral language story telling or for inspiration for creating a written story. Stories could be created individually or as a class using an IWB.

Stories can be written on the site and saved to a gallery or alternatively, students could just write on paper.

Especially with younger students, oral language is an important area that can sometimes be neglected in the crowded curriculum.

The possibilities of Five Card Flickr are only limited by the students’ creativity! Give it a try.

Do you know any other sites that are useful for writing or oral language prompts?

This week, I have been reinforcing to my Grade Two students the importance of correctly using full stops and capital letters to form sentences. I have found that primary students of all age groups tend to need constant reinforcement of these concepts.

My students defined a sentence as “a piece of writing that makes sense by itself, starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark.”

I used some great online resources to teach students about sentences, full stops and capital letters.

BBC Skillswise Making Sentences

This site by the BBC has some great factsheets, quizzes, games and worksheets about sentences. My students particularly enjoyed the games which involve deciding whether sentences make sense and adding punctuation to text. This site also has links to activities about putting sentences together and using commas.

Capital Letters and Full Stops

This site from the Welsh National Grid for Learning includes explanations, games, worksheets and activities about using capital letters and full stops. The resources revolve around a theme of “Dewi the Dragon”. My students enjoyed punctuating the sentences in the story about Dewi with capital letters and full stops.

Have you tried any of these resources or do you know of any other resources for teaching about sentences?

I recently came across two sites that would be useful in the lower primary classrooms for reading lessons.

SIGNED STORIES

This British site contains a collection of free animated stories. Each story is read, signed and also has the words down the bottom of the page for students to follow along. There are hundreds of popular children’s stories available in a range of genres and the site is growing all the time. While this site was created for hearing impaired children and their families, it has many  uses in the classroom. The videos can be paused to focus on particular teaching points. The fact that the story is read aloud also means that students can independently “read” a more difficult text than they would be able to on their own. Click here to check it out.

READING IS FUNDAMENTAL: LEADING TO READING

Although this site is publicised as being for children age 3 to 5, I believe it is a valuable resource for students up to Grade Two. It contains a collection of stories, songs and games. The animated stories highlight each word as it is spoken which makes it easier for students to read along. The story can be paused to focus on teaching points. The collection of stories for school age children is limited at this stage although I expect it will continue to grow. The site is very easy for non-readers to navigate as each option is spoken when you hover your mouse over it. Click here to check out Leading to Reading.

Leave a comment if you have any thoughts about using these two sites in your classroom.

Speechable is a cool website I found out about from David Kapuler’s blog. It is simply an easy way to add a speech bubble to an image. You can upload an image from your computer or a URL and photos can be shared with friends via email or on Facebook®, MySpace®, Orkut, blogs, and message boards.

Here is a pic from the Speechable gallery

Adding speech bubbles to images could be a fun activity for children, a literacy task or even a classroom competition. You can make photos private which means you can still email and embed them but they won’t appear in the site’s gallery. Check it out.

Read Write Think is a site from the UK that offers a collection of online Student Materials to support literacy learning in the P-12 classroom.

While this site includes lesson plans and web resources, I have found the most useful aspect of the site to be the Student Materials. There are over 50 interactive resources that would be great to use on the IWB in any literacy classroom.

There are many “thinking tool” type resources that could be used as an after reading task such as a plot diagram, book cover creator, character trading cards, story map and timeline. Here is a Venn diagram a group of my Grade Two students made this week after we read a book in Guided Reading.

There are also some great “learning centre” type games for younger students such as Word Wizard, ABC Match, Word Family Sort and  What’s in the Bag? My Grade Two students particularly enjoy Construct-a-word.

The site also includes some useful “writing” resources such as Acrostic Poems, Animal Inquiry, Postcard Creator, Flip Book and Letter Generator.

There are some limitations to this site such as the fact that some work can’t be saved although it can be printed and there is always the option to screen capture your work. Overall, Read Write Think has some great resources for all year levels.