Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

We all have them — words that baffle us, even when we use them all the time. I, for one, still have trouble with “lay” and “lie” and even remember getting an angry letter from a reader about my use of lay instead of lie (or was it the other way around?) when I was a newspaper reporter. The aptly named Confusing Words is a website that might come in handy for those times of confusion. It contains more than 3,000 words that people tend to have trouble with, and it accepts suggestions for more. The site was developed by the husband of a teacher, who had asked if there was some way to develop a system to help her students deal with common grammatical word errors.

Confusing Words is simple enough to use. Just type in a word that you find confusing, spelling it as best as you can (the site’s programming has some special tricks to finding words spelled close to the original). The site then gives you a list of words that might be confusing due to similar spelling or meanings, provides definitions, and then shows examples of how each word is used in proper context.

If nothing else, you should print the read-outs for the their/there/they’re and to/two/too helpers and pass them out to your students. Strunk and White will surely thank you.

Confusing Words

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Tom Barrett has turned collaboration and sharing among teachers into an art form, and the results of these collaborations is a series of Google Presentations that can provide valuable insight into a wealth of possible technology tools for the classroom.

Tom (whose blog at EDTE.CH is worth a visit or two) has been exploring the possibility of iPods, Wallwisher, pocket video cameras, Twitter, Google Earth, Prezi and more as potential learning opportunities for students.

The real power comes when he asks teachers with ideas and experience to add to his presentations through the collaborative nature of Google Presentations. The result is a list of ever-growing resources that tap into a wide range of topics and levels of entry with a wide array of teaching voices.

Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways to…

• Get to Know Your New Class
• Ideas for Class Blog Posts
• Use a Learning Platform in the Classroom
• Support Spelling in the Classroom
• Teach Reading Comprehension in the Classroom
• Use Web Conferencing in the Classroom
• Make Your Classroom a Sparkly Place to Learn
• Use Audio in Your Classroom
• Use Wallwisher in the Classroom
• Support Writing in the Classroom
• Use an iPod Touch in the Classroom
• Nintendo Wii in the Classroom
• Use a Wiki in the Classroom
• Use a Visualizer in the Classroom
• Use Twitter in the Classroom
• Use Wordle in the Classroom
• Use Your Pocket Video Camera in the Classroom
• Use Google Docs in the Classroom
• Use Google Earth in the Classroom
• Use a Nintendo DS in the Classroom
• Use Search Engines in the Classroom
• Use Your Interactive Whiteboard in the Classroom
• Prezi in the Classroom
• Use Voicethread in the Classroom
• Use the iPad in the Classroom
• Use Google Search in the Classroom
• Use Google Maps in the Classroom

BY KEVIN HODGSON

SpellingCity presents a multitude of activities students can use to practice spelling. A teacher simply enters the spelling words, and SpellingCity presents several options for what to do with them. Choices include:

“Test Me,” which repeats each spelling word with a live voice and uses it in a sentence. I put in a few words from my students’ vocabulary list and clicked here. The site creates a text box for students to write the word after they hear it spoken by the automated voice. What I liked best was that SpellingCity then used my word in a sentence. The site has a large database of words and sentences that it draws from.

(more…)

When I attended school there was a big push for whole language instruction and very little emphasis was placed on phonics. Now in education the pendulum has swung the other way and we are seeing that phonics instruction is crucial, not only in reading but spelling as well. The English language with all its rules is a tricky one to teach, especially in the areas of phonics. BBC Schools has a great site to help teach and provide reinforcement with all of these tricky phonics patterns.

BBC Words and Pictures is an interactive site that offers many resources in phonics and reading development. Teachers can use this site to initiate lessons and provide extra practice for their struggling readers. You can also find resources parents can use at home. The site offers numerous interactive activities, working with phonemes, consonant vowel consonant patterns, consonant clusters, long vowel patterns, and high frequency words. With each activity, a colorful character with a charming British accent gives students the directions needed to engage them in the activity. The site also makes the proper phonetic sounds for the student. This additional aspect of the site makes it valuable to your ESL learners as well as your non-reading students.

The teacher and parent resource sections are full of printables that can provide students with additional practice. BBC Words and Pictures also offers curriculum relevance to help correlate these activities with your learning objectives. As teachers, let’s make sure our early readers get the phonics foundation needed to become life long readers and proficient spellers.-MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

BBC Words and Pictures

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I have to shake my head every time I hear some Congressman arguing for cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because, “Cable TV provides plenty of early childhood educational programming.” Don’t get me wrong, my son learned a ton about inductive and deductive reasoning from watching “Blue’s Clues” and “Dora the Explorer,” but for actual reading skills like letter identification, phonics and blending, Public Television is the best source of materials. I will never forget how hilarious and memorable Gawain’s Word made learning the concept of blending. But how to get these great lessons into your classroom on your time?

Enter Teachers’ Domain, a resource for teachers from WGBH in Boston. There are a number of special collections, Early Literacy (with Between the Lions), Civil Rights, and Polar Sciences. A special collection is in the Open Educational Resources which will allow you to download, share and remix. Get some of this educational video goodness and start blending up some learning in your class. -ALICE MERCER

Teachers’ Domain: Gawain’s Word: box
Teachers’ Domain: Open Educational Resources
Teachers’ Domain: Home

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Do your students struggle on spelling tests? For every easy word like “cat” or “dog” you have tricky ones like “perceive” or “through.” It’s as if the English language were designed to fool people. “I before E except after C?” Capricious and arbitrary, if you ask me. And why would you have silent letters? Are they spares in case other letters in the word break down?

Education.com has a few spelling tips designed for teachers and parents in their article, The Fast Track to Spelling Success. One method they advocate is the “Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check,” method:

“Ask your child to write his spelling words in the first column, one underneath the other.

• Look. Ask your child to look at the word and read it aloud. For example, “friend”
• Say. Then spell the word letter by letter while continuing to look at it. “f-r-i-e-n-d”
• Cover. Your child should now cover the word “friend” (either with her hand, another piece of paper or by folding that column underneath the others) and try to write “friend” in the second column, without looking at the first column.
• Check. Now, have your child check her work by comparing the first column with the second column. If it’s correct, move on to the second word. If it’s incorrect, ask her to repeat the steps, this time trying to write “friend” in the third column.”

The article also has other ideas for different learning styles. My favorite, designed for the kids who can’t sit still, is to have them practice spelling while doing a physical activity, such as jumping rope, shouting out a letter with each jump (also a good way to burn off some of their extra energy).

All the methods listed in this article require lots of practice. However, if you follow their advice, that practice will be more productive – and more fun. -BILL FERRIS

The Fast Track to Spelling Success via education.com

I have always depended on the kindness of talking cartoon animals. Whether I learned about hibernation from Yogi Bear, or was exposed to opera by Bugs Bunny, animated animals are dependable and oft-overlooked fonts of knowledge. Why should learning to read be any different? That’s why, when teaching your elementary students their ABCs, let them have a look at Sight Words with Samson.

The Samson in question is a dog wearing a track suit who speaks with a vaguely German accent (I think – it’s hard to tell). The site lets kids play games that strengthen their word-building. After starting off by viewing a word and listening to it spoken out loud in a sentence, kids are challenged to pick the word out of a lineup, or to spell it. With practice, your students will be able to know and spell words on sight.

Sight Words with Samson also has other resources, including printable flashcards, lesson plans, and worksheets. In my opinion, though, the online word games are are your best bet. The video game factor will keep kids more interested, and Samson will hopefully open your students’ eyes to the wonderful learning possibilities of listening to talking cartoon critters. -BILL FERRIS

Sight Words with Samson

8 Letters in Search of a Word presents players with one scrambled 8-letter word to unscramble. If you can’t quite figure out what it is, make the most of the letters you’ve got and find as many words as you can before time runs out. You get more points for longer words and for finding them faster – you know, the usual. At the end of each round, the letters are unscrambled, so students can see the word they missed.

I often find in word games that I learn a lot of new words as time runs out. With only a few seconds left in a round, I’ll try any letter combination that even looks like a word (did you know”ree” was a word? Neither did I!). So in addition to practicing spelling and word identification, your kids can expand their vocabularies. Another potential project? Challenge their spelling and their creativity by having them try to unscramble a new name for the game. The game itself is fun, but “8 Letters in Search of a Word” is an awful title. -BILL FERRIS

8 Letters in Search of a Word

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