Monday, February 9, 2015

Overwhelmed with Indiana Literacy Liaisons?

If you are anything like me, you place all the Indiana Literacy Liaisons emails into a file telling yourself you will read them later. Then, you have a hard time finding the time to get back to those emails. When I woke up Tuesday morning of last week to 18 new emails, starting at 6pm and streaming through until 6am, I thought maybe there was a virus involved. As I moved through the emails, I found there were some resources I had already used and determined the emails were from a credible source.
I went through the emails and found a few great resources. The items I am sharing with you are all free, although many require a username and password. Here is a quick synopsis of the resources I thought would be helpful…
 A to Z Teacher Stuff is a teacher-created site designed to help teachers find online resources more quickly and easily. Find lesson plans, thematic units, teacher tips, discussion forums for teachers, downloadable teaching materials and eBooks, printable worksheets and blacklines, emergent reader books, themes, and more. It includes Popular Lesson Planning Themes (Dr. Seuss, Space, Plants, etc.) and Theme Resource Pages by Month. This website is geared to lower elementary.
Common Core standards based, and requires you to create a free account. Educators can find and share curricula and instructional resources, including standards-aligned lesson plans. It offers over 10,000 complete Iessons, searchable by subject, grade, or standard.
Teachers can join for free, add classes up to 35, and create lessons in five minutes. The site also lets you Organize (collect web resources in one place and share with just one link), Assess (measure student understanding with built-in quizzes), and Track (monitor student progress and adapt to student needs in real-time).
Educade is a free website offering engaging and interactive lesson plans to use with 21st century tools, such as apps, games, and maker kits. The lessons are searchable by subject, grade (including special needs), tool type (such as an app, augmented reality, or video), or platform (e.g., web browser, iOS, Android tablet). Individuals can create accounts that save lesson plans, and can easily create their own using the site’s templates.
According to this website, “Being fit takes more than just eating right and exercising. It also means doing simple things to help you make healthy choices throughout the day. Discovery Education, Sanford Health and WebMD teamed up to create a new program for elementary educators and students called fit 4 the classroom, which brings the four pillars of the fit initiative – mood, move, food, and recharge – into the classroom. The fit initiative, located athttp://fit.webmd.com/, contains a suite of free resources designed to empower children and parents to make healthy lifestyle choices.
NextLesson is a free website featuring lesson plans and projects using a variety of resources, including video, worksheets, websites, references to apps (where appropriate), and a comprehensive teacher guide. Lessons are fully searchable by subject area, grade, Common Core standard, and 21st Century Skill. The projects and lessons integrate with a task management tool for students, and teachers have a view of their progress.
ReadWorks is a nonprofit service that has cataloged hundreds of lesson plans and more than one thousand nonfiction reading passages aligned to Common Core standards. Recently, ReadWorks added a new batch of science passages with accompanying question sets to use in elementary and middle schools. ReadWorks provides units, lessons, and authentic, leveled nonfiction and literary passages based on research-based instructional practices in reading comprehension. Lessons can be filtered by grade level, skill/strategy, or unit theme. Materials are free, online, and aligned both to Common Core State Standards as well as standards for all 50 states. In their free account, teachers can create digital binders of the lesson plans and reading passages that they want to use.

ReadWriteThink, sponsored by the International Reading Association, offers a free searchable database of lesson plans and resources focused on reading, writing, and thinking. It is searchable by key word, grade level, learning objective, theme, or resource type. Lesson plans are well thought out, and each one has been aligned to the IRA/NCTE Standards for the English Language Arts as well as individual state standards.

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