Improving Language Skills

Daily Oral Language helps students focus on grammar, punctuation, and spelling skills. From the website:

Efficient! Fill lost learning time with fun, focused skill-building routines. Effective! Develop vital skills in just 5 to 10 minutes a day. Economical! Find all you need for the whole school year in these low-cost Teacher's Manuals.

Easy to use! Transparency sets provide alternative lesson presentations.

As students correct and discuss two sentences daily, they review and maintain punctuation, capitalization, usage, and writing skills while developing and practicing proofreading skills.

There is a free sampler on the site. Or buy the book!

Link.

Vocabulary Activities/ Games

Today, I called in sick because I wasn't feeling well. Yes, I'm writing this while I'm sick. Anyone who is a teacher knows that you have to write out substitute teacher lesson plans. Well, much of what I do on any given day is guided instruction and group discussion. Since I don't expect the substitute teacher to do that, I had to find some filler. Therefore, I Googled "vocabulary high school" and got these two sites:

* Vocabulary University
* Learning Vocabulary Can Be Fun

There is a blog at the latter site that can be found at this link.

I love the Internet. It makes finding good activities easy.

Writing Prompts for Journal Writing and Other Activities

At the beginning of each class, I have my students write on a topic of the day. Also, I've begun having my students write compositions. Therefore, I need writing prompts. I found these on the web:

* Writing Prompts/ Journal Topics in CanTeach (these aren't meant for elementary students, but many of the writing prompts can be used in secondary classrooms, too.)

* An interactive page of Creative Writing Prompts in CreativeWritingPrompts.com

* Writing Prompts from EverydaySpelling.com

* Daily Writing Prompts from TheTeacher'sCorner.net includes PDF documents that you can print!
y Writing Prompts
...and many more can be found by doing a Google Search.

Suggestion: As with my sponge activities, I've created a folder for lesson plans. I could put these prompts either in lesson plans or in sponge activities folders based on how I used them.

Sponge Activities

I've been running out of stuff to do in my classroom. I've discovered that wasted time leads to classroom management problems. So I've been looking for "sponge activities" to soak up that extra time. Below are sites that offer these type of activities:

* Sponge Activities from InspiringTeachers.com

* Sponges from Dr. Mora's Cross Cultural Language and Academic Development (CLAD) website.

* Don't Waste a Minute!, Five Minute Fillers Archives (40 volumes), Substitute Survival: Mini-Lessons for Unexpected Moments, Word-Zles and Ten Games for Classroom Fun! - all from Education World

* Sponge Activities from the Northside Independent School District

... and there are many more sites on the web that I found by just doing a Google Search.

Suggestion: I've created a folder for just sponge activities. As I have come across a good activity I either print or copy it and put it in the folder. I've placed the folder behind my desk so that I can access it anytime that I need something to do.

How Do I Get Students to Read and Write?

I've been looking for a way to motivate my students to read and write. If found this bit of advice on the website Teachnet.com:

Model Reading and Writing for your Students:

Reality means that students' reading and writing abilities are sliding. We can point the finger at outside influences like television, but there are things we can all do to bolster these skills in small, subtle ways. Things like writing messages to the students on the board at the beginning of the day, encouraging students to write you notes that you could respond to, modeling good reading by reading aloud to your class and sharing why you like the book, or becoming pen pals with another class over the internet. Our custodian even left a positive message for our class one day! These are but a few of the examples of how you can coax your students into using their reading and writing skills.

At a set time each day or each week, all available staff members at some schools, including secretaries, custodians, principals and kitchen aides, share reading time either reading to small groups of students, or with students reading to them.

Often I set time at the end of class to have my students read. I have many books in my classroom bookcase, as well as magazines and newspapers (but not nearly enough.) I also have had them go to the library to check out books. I always model by reading something myself.

At the end of the reading period, I model good reading techniques. First, I tell them how I used prior knowledge to predict what I am reading. Usually I do this by just talking about the title of the story that I read. Then I tell them about the questions that I had while reading. Lastly, I tell them the answers that I discovered by reading. In other words I do the KWL method: what I know, what I want to know, and what I learned.

However, I don't end it there. I first distribute blank index cards to them. I then ask them to answer the KWL questions about what they read. Before I pick up their cards, I ask a couple of students to share their answers with the class.

As far as writing is concerned, I always have the students write in their journals for the first five minutes of class. Then I have a few students share what they wrote with the class.

Link to Teachnet article.

Some Cool Teacher Resources

1. The Lesson Plans Page currently contains over 3,000 lesson plans written by real teachers. You can also contribute your own lesson plans by clicking on this link. The site also contains a lesson plan guide that gives step by step instructions on how to write a lesson plan. There are many more things on the site, including open teacher discussion forums.

2. Hot Chalk is a free site that allows teachers to post assignments online and allows students to discuss assignments with each other and the teacher. This program reminds me of Moodle; however, unlike Moodle you do not need to download a program. The program is embedded in the website. From the site, here's more information about Hot Chalk:

At HotChalk, our mission is to improve the lives of teachers. Our community
software makes it possible for teachers to work together, making lesson
planning, assignment distribution, collection and grading easier than ever
before. HotChalk puts students in charge of their grades by giving them the
information they need to manage their academic responsibilities. HotChalk makes
communicating with parents easy, turning teachers, students, and parents into
high-performance teams to produce measurable academic results.

Be warned, though, Hot Chalk may expose your students to advertisements. Once again, quoted from the site:

The HotChalk Learning Environment is free for all schools everywhere and is
based on an advertising-supported business model. With the patent-pending
HotChalk Community Standards Engine, each school can control which ads students
see, and determine which ads are shown. Please note that HotChalk never displays
advertising during the school day to students. Also children under the age of 13
are never exposed to advertising.

An Extra-Credit Puzzle Maker

I found a site that allows teachers to make puzzles for their students: Puzzlemaker from DiscoverySchools.com. You can make crossword puzzles, cryptograms and other types of puzzles on this site.

Of course, you can also find lesson plans on this site.