American Pickers Contest

Pick and Tell Contest 

Do your students (or kids) love American Pickers? If so they are having a great contest (Deadline is May 1st so you have to hurry!) The winner receives $10,000 and a trip to Washington DC to meet the Pickers! Click here for all the information! Open to students in grades 5-8.

The Why Files

Click Here for the Why Files

 

 

 

 

The Why Files is a site devoted to helping students understand the science, math, and technology behind the news. Sent each week to your inbox, The Why Files offers a great site to send students in your science class to research current events.In your Literacy class, it is a great resource for finding higher level non-fiction text. Check out the teacher section for lessons and activities for you to use in class.

Power Point Search

PowerPoint presentations can be extremely useful in the classroom to help introduce a lesson and to help students understand the concepts being taught. Below is a list of sites that offer already made PPT presentations for teachers. Some can be modified, others cannot. Besides the list below, a good way to search for a PPT with Google is to simply put in the topic name followed by filetype ppt. For example a search for Civil War PPTs would look like: "Civil War" filetype ppt.

Pete's PowerPoints

World of Teaching - Click on the topic you need

PPT Palooza

PPT Search Engine

Books For Boys

Click Here for Read Kiddo Read

Click Here for Books 4 Boys
Boys often have a hard time picking and finding books that interest them. Here are three sites to help the boys in your class find books. These are great sites to put on your website to direct them to when they, "Can't find ANYTHING to read."

Click Here for Guys Read

Finally....Pottermore!!!

Pottermore.com

Finally...Pottermore! My daughter has been waiting for over a year for this and finally it is starting to be rolled out. Pottermore is where you will find everything Harry Potter. Pottermore is more than a fan site - Pottermore is a transmedia experience where readers will be able to interact with and help the Potter stories come alive. Originally Pottermore was slated to open last October, but was delayed until now. They are rolling out "admission" to Pottermore slowly - so sign up now to get your invite in a few days. 

Here is a great video by J,K. Rowling explaining Pottermore.

Have fun exploring Pottermore!

Operation Blustery Day

Operation Blustery Day

Operation Blustery Day is a great site to use as a center in your classroom. To play: help the bunny get to his home on a blustery day. To do this you need to correctly select the correct operation you would need to perform to answer the word problem. Each correct answer gets the bunny closer to home - every wrong answers gets him further away. A great game for students struggling with basic word problems. Best for grades 2-4.

Jamestown

Learning about Jamestown? Our third grade teachers are! Here are two great sites to infuse into your Jamestown unit.

The first is from National Geographic Kids, On the Trail of Captain John Smith is a fantastic transmedia site that blends story, games, and "choose your own adventure" all in one! Best used as a whole class with an interactive white board or a projector. Once finished, have the students demonstrate what they learned by pretending to be John Smith and sending a postcard home from Jamestown explaining everything that happened to him and what it is like to live in this new colony!

The second site is also very interactive. The site, by History Globe, transports you back to 1606 as a Jamestown settler. You need to make the same decisions that the Jamestown settlers faced, you even get the opinions of Native Americans, Colonists and the Charter to help you. The best part, at the end you get a report of your choices. It will also tell you what we now know about the decisions that the settlers made and how they could have made better decisions.  Just like the first resource, sending a post card home would be a fun, quick way to assess the students understanding of the content learned.