Michelle Ezrachie

While searching through Goggle, I came across web sites that I would encourage educators to take a glance at. The web sites are called “Can Teach” and “Busy Teacher’s Café”. These web sites offer numerous ideas and tools to help the educator incorporate literacy in the classroom. In particular, “Can Teach” is aimed for young students ranging from kindergarten to the second grade. This web site includes numerous listening activities, as well as writing, reading, drawing, speaking, and talking activities. As I continued my search through the web site, a couple of activities really caught my eye. First, I found an activity which involved listening to a story and drawing pictures that followed along with the story. I feel this will help my students listening skills as well as help my students imagine the story. Another activity that I feel students will enjoy is called making silly sentences. This involves picking words out of a bag and then putting them together to form silly sentences. Then, once you state the sentence out loud, the child writes it down and draws a picture to match the sentence. I think students will enjoy this activity because there is an element of surprise. Students can strengthen their creativity skills when drawing.
I came across another helpful web site called “Busy Teacher’s Café”.I really enjoyed this web site because the educator will have the choice to guide the students to a subject in which to concentrate on. These include literacy center management, language arts center, independent reading center, vocabulary center, word work center, computer center, writing center, poetry center, listening center, and literature circles. Depending on the area in which you would like to concentrate on, you would then click on the tab of interest. In my case, I enjoyed the link to the poetry center. By clicking on the tab, the web site recommended fifteen different ideas to use in the classroom for the poetry unit. In addition this web site also included links in which you can access charts, bookmarks, and task cards. This is very beneficial because the handouts are pre-made and can be universally used. As you scroll down, this web site also offers recommendations to sites related to the topic in which you selected. For poetry, there were at least six different web sites to choose from. These web sites had a wide variety of educational games. Both “Can Teach” and “Busy Teacher’s Café” are beneficial web sites to use in a classroom. I found that googling on the Internet offers many refreshing ideas for teaching literacy and definitely see myself using them in the future.

http://www.canteach.ca/elementary/beginning10.html
http://www.busyteacherscafe.com/literacy_stations/main.htm