Online Reading Games

Hello, fellow teachers!

Check out the online reading games you can use in your classroom. :)

Online Reading Games for Young Readers
· Primary Games: Language Arts from PrimaryGames.com includes games with color words, contractions, ordinal numbers, see& spell activities, electronic stationary, ABC games, an electronic bookshelf, and more. Kids can also use the sidebar to access other activites focused around math, social studies or science topics.
· Literacy Center.net, sponsored by the Early Childhood Education Network, provides an interesting range of exercises to enhance beginning reading skills like letter identification and formation, spelling, shapes, color and keyboarding skills. The games require Flash 5 in order to play, which you can download from the site, and the interface works much like a piece of software so you almost forget that you're using the Internet.
· For those of you kindergarten teachers that focus your themes around the "Letter of the Week" or for teachers looking for great examples of alliteration for young readers and email opportunities for students, Animabets.com is a great site to visit. Friendly characters are associated with each letter of the alphabet and children can use the alphabet to access information about each character. "Each Animabets character has an email address and the authors encourage kids to send email to their favorite Animabets characters. Kids that send email can expect positive, uplifting and timely responses"; all while keeping a close eye on Internet safety. The Activities button links you to lots of fun games and the Learning button links kids to lots of interesting information about a variety of topics. This site is free of advertisments and, in my opinion, gives a preview of what may be coming in terms of more interactive, educational resources available online.
· Words and Pictures from BBC Education has lots of games and activities to enhance phonics skills. Long vowels are introduced through animated poems, you can practice spelling with "Drag 'n Spell" or listen for medial sounds coming from "Jim's Crankophone". The site also includes printable activity sheets for use in Literacy Circle activities. For emergent readers, the I Spy web site provides a motivational environment for locating pictures in traditional I Spy fashion or there's even a place

--from www.suite101.com

Rae :)

Liam's Rules in Pattern-Making

How to Make Patterns:

1. Use your brain.
2. Use your hands to make it.
3. Try to think of something with shapes.
4. Use a star in the middle like diamonds and green triangles.
5. Use your imagination.

Also remember that patterns repeat.

-Liam Sacal K2A

Joaquin's Rules in Playing Chess

How to Play Chess:

1. The same height cannot eat each other.
2. The tall ones can eat the small ones.
3. The small ones cannot eat the big ones.
4. The horse jump “L”. The others go straight.
5. The grown-ups stay at the back! ;P

by: Joaquin Streegan K2A

K2A's New Students

Mark Jenkins and Han Hyusik (Spencer)

If you see these new faces, they're from K2A. They just started school last week. Have a nice weekend! And a safe Sinulog 2008 to all of us. :)

-Charisse

Notes from Jan Millikan, Reggio Approach

One of our strengths has been to start out from a very clear, very open declaration of our ideas about the young child. It is a highly optimistic vision of the child: a child who possess many resources at birth, and with an extraordinary potential which has never ceased to amaze us; a child with the independent means to build up his own thought processes, ideas, questions and attempts at answers; with a high level of ability in conversing with adults, the ability to observe things and to reconstruct them in their entirety.



This is a gifted child, for whom we need a gifted teacher... a co-constructor of knowledge, values and understandings together with children; a cultured and curious person, which means an inveterate border crosser; and a researcher, with an enquiring and critical mind.



-Loris Malaguzzi

The Hundred Languages of Children

Since it's the 100th Day of School... ;)
I have here one of the greatest poems I've read about children.

The Hundred Languages
Loris Malaguzzi

THE CHILD
is made of one hundred.

The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred, always a hundred
ways of listening,
of marvelling, of loving,
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding,
a hundred worlds
to discover,
to invent,
to dream.

The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.

They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and Christmas.

They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine
forcing thought without a body
action without a mind.

They tell the child:
that work and play,
reality and fantasy,
science and imagination,
sky and earth,
reason and dream
are things that do not belong together.

And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child knows:
The Hundred is there.


I hope we are not stealing the hundred languages of our children :)
-charisse