Hello Class!
This semester went by so quickly but for some reason, I was really able to get to know you all just a bit more! It has been a very productive and chaotic semester but we did it! Looking forward to our next set of classes where I'm sure we'll do great!
Dr. Rivera, thank you for your kindness and always being such a great support system for us! Your support has been essential in our success!
To my Classmates:
Goodbye and see you next week!
Fellow classmates of ED 638 we are closing one chapter of our journey towards obtaining a Master's Degree in Reading and opening up another. Thank you for your hard work and professionalism throughout this semester. The coursework has allowed me to share a bit of who I am with you all and vice versa. It is both motivating and inspiring to work alongside such a diverse group of individuals are working towards a common goal. I'm glad we have our class blog to look back on as a resource as well as a reminder of the hard work we are capable of. It is definitely a tool that will help me improve and promote literacy in my classroom. I look forward to continuing this journey we started almost half a year ago. Lets finish strong!
It has been a great four weeks with you all! I enjoyed posting and reading about the plethora of literacy websites, getting to know everyone a little better through the Getting to Know You activity and the personal timeline activity. We are one step closer to our shared goal of obtaining our Master's Degree in Reading! Let's get through the next 11 months and finish strong, everyone!
See you all next week!
Another step closer to graduation! We all have successfully completed two courses from our list, and are very proud of our accomplishments. I would like to thank Dr. Rivera for the valuable knowledge I have gained during the Fall intersession course. I look forward to seeing you all in the upcoming spring semester!
Another semester in the books! We are another step closer to the goal. I have learned many new tools, websites, and knowledge from this semester. When you reach the point where you are tired and overwhelmed, think about your students in the future who now have a better chance in becoming successful all because their teacher had many strategies and knowledge in literacy/reading that could help them.
I wish everyone all the best and see you all once the Spring semester starts. We are halfway there.
Congratulations everyone! We did it! Another semester down and another semester to go! It has been great reading everyones post and interacting with you all. This course has been very informative and resourceful! See you all in the next course! 3 more semesters or 11 more months till graduation! Don't quit! Just Keep Moving Forward!
The sixth effective literacy website that I will be discussing is the Reading Bear (https://www.readingbear.org/) site. This was one of the first few websites that I had listed on our Google Docs, but decided to discuss it towards the end. This website has a lot to offer its users.
When you first get into the website, you are greeted with a picture of a reading bear, which is very fitting for the name of the website. Then there are a few tabs to click on that include: home page, log in, about us, getting started, training videos, and log out. The home page also includes a list of ‘First Learn the Letter Sounds’ where if there is a specific letter sound that you are trying to focus on, you can easily access the available materials from there.
When you click on the desired letter sound, it will lead to the page where there are a variety of activities and materials to use. First, the options to sound out the letters slowly, then sounding it out quickly, audio flashcards, and progress to audio sentences and silent sentences. This is a great way to have the student(s) become familiar with the letters and the various short or long sounds of letters. There are short videos that help with pronunciation as well as images that correlate with the word(s) being read or shown.
There are also training videos that teachers and parents can access in order to be able to use the website more efficiently. The videos include the introduction to the Reading Bear website, how to add sub accounts, and how to review the quiz results. Being able to review the quiz results is very helpful in tracking how the student is progressing.
Overall, this is a great website for reading/literacy. It puts a lot of emphasis on going over the basics, down to the letter sounds. There are many videos, audio materials and just useful literacy materials in general.
PhonicsandStuff
The fifth effective literacy website that I will be discussing is the website PhonicsandStuff. This website has a variety of useful literacy materials. Upon entering the website you will see the tabs for ‘games, read-alongs, decodable readers, teaching tools, articles, and a link to their TPT Store. When you click on the ‘games’ tab you will see a variety of phonics and reading games. These games include: sound blending, sound letter match, reading words, short vowels, spelling, abc order among others. These games can be a useful tool for students who might need assistance with the very basics of literacy but need a change of activity. This website will provide a good variety that continues the practice of literacy.
There are also decodable readers that can be accessed and used for the student to practice. It also shows which short vowels, consonants, word types, and tricky words. They can also be downloaded and printed which would also be helpful for extra practice when the student does not have access to the website.
The website also has Read-Along Stories which are great to show your students or just for a student to access. They are able to listen to some books and can read-along. This is a wonderful part of the website that can help greatly with literacy. There are various Tools for Teaching Phonics that can be accessed from this website. These tools help with graphemes, phonemes, building word lists, creating decodable sentences, a phoneme reference guide, among others. Phonics Articles are available for users to access, these articles are useful especially for teachers who are working on the very basics of reading/literacy with their students.
Overall, the website Phonics + Stuff provides its users a variety of materials that can be very useful for improving literacy for the child/student. There are activities for a student to do when they access the website, as well as materials that a teacher/parents can access to help their child progress and improve their literacy skills.
As the great Martin Luther King Jr. stated, "If you can't fly, then run; if you can't run, then walk; if you can't walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward."
We have successfully made it to the end of this course. If your journey has been similar to mine, we've faced many challenges. But with each great challenge came even greater successes. I am lucky to have many online resources reviewed and approved by some of Guam's best educators. May we never lose sight of our ultimate goal and purpose: to graduate in December 2024 and provide our students with the necessary tools for success, regardless of their abilities. Have a wonderful rest of your new year, and may you continue to move forward.
Hello everyone!
It's been an amazing journey thus far and I am so proud of how far we have all have come. It definitely has not been easy, but we have all managed to push through and persevere! After this spring intercession officially marks our half way point in our masters journey! We are almost there!! Very excited to continue to learn and grow further with all of you on this road to masters of education in reading! Stay safe everyone and enjoy this 3 day weekend!
best regards,
Carl
Farewell
Message from Leif Andres:
Thank you
to my professor and classmates for another fun and insightful course. It’s
great that we were able to make it through this intercession course while still
being able to enjoy the New Year and holidays. I’m looking forward to seeing
you all again in the next course!
Anthony Ponce
Well all I have to say is "it's been a real one." Great discussion, meaningful learning, a lot of websites and awesome collaboration with colleagues. Looking forward to the next. Will relax and enjoy the 15 minute break and on to Spring Semester. Great job everyone. Esta!
Hafa Adai Dr. Rivera and classmates,
This ED638 course was a tough one due to the fast pace. Although it was more rigorous than the others, we are almost there! The resources, assignments, and tools we gathered and compiled will for sure place us ahead of those who were not aware that it exists. I am looking forward to the upcoming courses that will make us all one step closer to the final product, our Master's degree! Good luck everyone and I will see you all in the next semester.
Word Game Time (https://wordgametime.com/) is a free website that offers language arts games and homework help. Games are fun and have been approved by educators. The goal of Word Game Time is to help students succeed. The site offers content for kindergarten through 7th grade students in spelling, typing, reading, geography, and language arts.
Word Game Time offers a user-friendly site with content organized by grade, subject, and content type. Content under language arts includes activities that help students with letter-sound recognition, parts of speech, subject-verb agreement, and other skills. Another interesting feature the website offers is educational videos. Videos are fun and engaging for all grade levels. Some videos are animated, and others offer instruction by a teacher.
Word Game Time is very similar to websites like ABCYa.com and Funbrain.com. But a feature that makes it unique is the variety of free worksheets for teachers, parents, and students to access. Although some sites offer worksheets, the ones on Word Game Time cover topics such as poetry, homophones, and dictionary practice.
Word Game Time is a great online resource for teachers, parents, and students searching for more variety in online learning and practice. Variety sets this website aside from other online learning games and resources sites. Materials are easily organized and easy to find. It is a site that makes learning fun and engaging.
Choosito (https://www.choosito.com/) is a smart search engine powered by artificial intelligence that provides resources based on a student’s reading level. Choosito is supported by the National Science Foundation.
On Choosito, teachers can set up accounts to allow students to search for material based on their reading level (early, emerging, fluent, and advanced readers) and specific subject areas. Users can then select where to search for resources – the Choosito Web, the Choosito library, the Choosito image database, public collections, or personal collections. Once the specifications are set, Choosito offers thousands of results for students and educators to access.
An interesting and unique feature Choosito offers is the Choosito Highlighter Tool. This tool is a browser extension for Google Chrome that allows users to highlight and add notes to various websites. This feature allows users to take researching the web to a whole new level by making content personalized to a reader’s needs.
Choosito is an excellent tool for students and teachers. The internet is filled with lots of content, and it can be difficult to ensure that what students search for is appropriate for their reading level and what they are looking for. Choosito eliminates the potential harms of the online world by providing material to children using artificial intelligence. Teachers and parents can be assured that their child is learning and reading at their level and that it is happening in a safe, online environment.
Roy the Zebra (https://www.rocketlit.com/) is a free resource that’s all about supporting emerging readers with their literacy skills, it’s used at schools and at home. This site is a great introduction to the kind of content you’ll find on their membership site Club Roy.
Roy the Zebra is home to an engaging range of reading, spelling, and punctuation games, as well as an exciting guided reading story, lesson plans, printable resources and even songs - this website is completely free.
Roy is aimed at 5 to 7 year-olds. It’s often used as a tool to support readers who aren’t progressing as expected - giving these readers an interesting and different resource builds their reading and spelling confidence and helps to establish an early ‘love for reading’. If you like the content on this free site then consider becoming a member of Club Roy.
Club Roy is Roy the Zebra’s membership site. It has 149 reading, spelling and punctuation games over 13 different topics and 16 game themes, Operation Rescue Lucy guided reading story plus more than 700 printable resources and is advert free. Club Roy aims to be an affordable resource to complement school reading systems and can be used at home as well.
Overall, Roy the Zebra is an excellent interactive site for emerging readers. The site consists mainly of a guided story section and interactive reading games section. The guided stories have pre and post-reading discussion sheets as well as related literacy worksheets. The interactive games section includes games on word level and sentence level to enhance skills such as phonics, rhyming words, alphabetical ordering, punctuation and comprehension etc. There is also a paid option in which you can install the reading software along with hundreds of printable resources like worksheets, flashcards, wall displays etc.
The sixth and final site I chose to review for my ILA Newsletter is Free Children Stories, https://www.freechildrenstories.com/. I chose this site because it is a e-library with a large collection of stories to choose from.
One of the great things about this website is that it
is completely free. Students and users are able to peruse through all the books
without having to pay a subscription fee or any other kind of fee. The website
is also incredibly user-friendly. There are only a few tabs at the top and
users can scroll down to view other resources and interesting books.
Another strength that this website has is the filters
it provides for sifting through its large selection of books. There are filters
that filter books relative to the users age so this makes finding appropriate
books for students very efficient. There are also fun filters like rhyming
stories and non-rhyming stories if there are certain activities that a teacher
is planning for his or her class.
As a reading resource, I believe this website is a
valuable one because it has an updated list of fan favorite stories of the week
and a list of the most popular books in the library. Another really amazing
function this site provides is a list of languages that the stories could be
translated in for audio use. I believe this function would be so valuable
especially when teaching English Language Learner students who are not
comfortable reading in English yet. This allows students to view the story in English
while listening to it in their home country’s language. Finally, there is also
a YouTube playlist of their books so students that are still learning fluency,
can have the stories modeled and read for them.
The fifth site I chose to review for my ILA Newsletter is Free Rice, https://freerice.com/home. This wonderful site drew me in with their promise of providing food for the people and children in need around the world.
This website is completely free and has a wonderful
idea behind it. Their promise to their users is that for every correct answer
submitted, the UN World Food Progamme will give 10 grains of rice to those in
need. The game is an vocabulary game where students will chose the correct meaning
for each given word. This is great as a reading resource because the stronger a
student’s vocabulary skills are, the stronger a student’s reading ability will
be.
I have used and found the vocabulary words in the game
more suitable for fourth and fifth graders, but younger grade levels may use it
too due to the functions that the site provides. I appreciated that one of the
functions was that if a user gets an answer wrong, a motivational banner and
the correct answer will be given so that users may learn from their mistakes
and become motivated to do better. Another great function of the game is that
users are able to see how many grains of rice were donated the previous day.
This will help students realize just how much rice they are helping the UN
World Food Programme provide to all those people in need.
Some other great resources this site provides are: a
blog page were students are able to see projects and aid that’s being provided
around the world to help the world become a more sustainable place, a
downloadable toolkit that will explain to students how to join the Free Rice
community, a downloadable certificate of participation to help students feel
more engaged in the game activity, and a downloadable A-Z Ebook that will
describe the meanings of the related vocabulary pertaining to the Free Rice community
and program.
The fourth site I chose to review for my ILA Newsletter is Dogo News, https://www.dogonews.com/. This is a wonderful site that focuses on giving kids and students current events and news in a friendly format.
This website is completely free and requires no
premium fees or subscription fees at all. The very first strength of this site
I noticed is how simple it is to navigate around. The website makes it very
easy and even kid-friendly to use and access its many functions and resources.
It also does a great job of having many different tabs and content areas, while
also making sure to stay streamlined and organized.
The amount of different current events on this site is
sizeable so the filters and tabs they provide works very well when one wants to
find a specific content area. There are multiple filters including sorting by
content (Science, Social Studies, Civics, World Environment, Fun, Sports), word
count, and type (video, articles, books).
Now reviewing this site
specifically on being related to reading content. I believe this site will be a
great resource for providing reading activities, projects, and lessons. The first reason is because students will be
able to strengthen their reading ability by perusing through the current event
articles on the site. This is great because not only are students receiving
reading practice, they are also receiving socials studies and science content
as well.
Another reason that this site would be great for
reading content is because Dogo News has a section called Dogo Books. Dogo
Books is basically a section where other young adults and kids give reviews on
popular books. Each popular book review also has a link to where one could find
the specific book to purchase or view. This section is also very well organized
by using filters like genres, reading levels, and series. There is even a book
club, quizzes on the books, and freebies.
The third site I chose to review for my ILA Newsletter is Super Teacher Worksheets, https://www.superteacherworksheets.com/. Although this site focuses on many subjects and content areas, the reading and phonics areas have so much resources that I believe this site could serve as a great resource to many others as well.
First thing first is the fee. Unfortunately, Super
Teacher is not free and contains a yearly subscription fee of $24.95. I usually
would not spend this much for access to a single site, but Super Teacher has
enough content that helps validate that fee personally. Once paid, a user can
stop his subscription fee without any additional payments to check whether he
or she would like to continue using this site in the future.
The first strength I believe this site has is the
sheer amount of worksheets, games, and other resources for many different
content areas. This review specifically covers the reading, phonics, and
comprehension areas. On the other hand, the other subject areas are also
sufficiently covered and may surprise other users as well.
Specifically reviewing reading and related content, I
believe Super Teacher has a great amount of resources that could even amount to
multiple websites put together. There are multiple tabs for many short reading
stories that are also paired with reading worksheets and activities. The great
thing is that there are different tabs that specify which grade level the
stories would be appropriate for. The worksheets and activities are also of a
great variety from multiple choice and short answer to self-reflection
questions and journal topics.
Super
Teacher also has a satisfying amount of phonics, early literacy, and letter
content. The large amount of resources consists of worksheets, games, projects,
arts and crafts, and much more. The games are also really helpful because they
include instructions and printables on how to play them. They can range from
letter bingo, I have this sight word who has this sight word, matching cards,
and much more.
Overall,
Super Teacher has been personally worth the subscription fee year after year
due to the massive amount of resources it provides. The best characteristic is
that although it is a great resource for reading and writing, it also serves as
a great resource for many other subjects as well.
Discovery Education https://www.discoveryeducation.com/ is an online website which offers information on technology and in the science fields. This website also makes for great literacy resources as it offers a curriculum that incorporates the STEM contents in an interactive experience that students online will read. In addition to it being a great literacy website, we have to also remember that students not only read through text, they also read and communicate through coding. This website offers practice on coding which is in itself a way to communicate and read through the web. Students who are interested in coding, this would be a great website for them.
Hello everyone,
Seeing our progress in taking this course, ED 698, is amazing. I learned a lot about incorporating technology into the classroom. Blogging itself is a learning experience for me. I am thrilled to see everyone’s work being informative and creative in sharing their reviews and ideas. Using internet tools can also be a game changer for me. I must incorporate it and apply it to my teaching.
I'm looking forward to exploring the possibilities that technology has to offer. This will help me improve my teaching and make it more effective. For instance, I can use Google Earth and other platforms to create a virtual classroom environment that encourages students to work together, learn from each other, and participate actively.
Despite the setbacks I experienced, I managed to strive harder and do the best I could in this course. This experience has taught me the importance of resilience and determination. I am now more motivated to continue learning and growing as a teacher. I look forward to applying what I have learned in my future classes.
I wish you all the best for the upcoming semester. Remember, with a positive attitude, we can achieve anything.
Readers
Eggs (https://readingeggs.com/)
has many fun, interactive lessons, tasks, and games for kids. The website has
fun animations and interactive parts that make learning to read fun. It also
provides rewards for completing tasks and games that motivate kids. Teachers
and parents can also monitor their children's progress using Reading Eggs.
Homeschool students can benefit from this platform since it offers many
educational literacy skills to enhance learning. It's an excellent supplemental
resource for anyone to take advantage of.
It
also provides differentiated instruction to meet the learning needs of each
child, providing individualized content based on progress. It encourages
children to explore different concepts and topics and helps them develop
problem-solving skills. It also provides feedback and guidance on how to
improve. I’m sure students will enjoy this platform due to its user-friendly
and engaging games.
Moreover,
it offers a 30-day free trial. It’s worth checking out this website. It’s
animated, interactive, and visually appealing. I’m eager to sign up to take
advantage of the free features. In the event that I am fully satisfied with the
offer, I may consider paying a monthly subscription to help my students improve
their literacy skills. It seems reasonably priced, too.
Interestingly,
I had to input my credit card information to sign up. I am skeptical about
providing credit card information for security reasons.
Unite for Literacy
The next website that I think is a great literacy website is Unite for Literacy (https://www.uniteforliteracy.com). This website is very simple and goes straight into the books. There is no need to create an account or the need to log in to access the materials. The website has many, many books to choose from. The levels of the books vary, so there will be books available for a variety of leveled readers. There is also an option for the text to be read aloud. This is a good option to have especially for those who are interested in the book but could be struggling with their literacy. There is also an option to read “About the Book”, when you click on this, it will take you to where the images from the book are from and a variety of sources that pertain to the book that you are about to read or have already read. The navigation of the site is very easy. You can search for a specific topic or browse the various categories of books the website has. This is a great website for literacy.
A little bit of a background about this literacy website, their main goal is to allow for more children to have access to many books that help to celebrate their languages and their varying cultures. They hope by doing this, they are allowing the children to have a ‘lifelong love of reading.’
The online library that the website has includes about 400 original picture books, with many also written in Spanish and audio narrations in about more than 40 different languages. This is a great feature especially for students who speak other languages and are interested in reading these varieties of books.
After exploring the various categories of books, I stumbled upon a book with the title having to do with living on an island, and as soon as it turned to the first page, Guam was mentioned in the story. I happen to think it is a great literacy win for our students, locally, because they are able to see the island they live on, included in a story is always nice. Although the pictures they used, in my opinion, were not taken on Guam, it was still a nice short story to read.
Overall, this is a great literacy website for when you want your students to do some reading for fun, where they do not need to remember to log in with a username and password. The students can easily go to the website and choose a book they are interested in reading.
Just like that fall intersession is over and spring semester is approaching. I had a great time reading through everyone’s literacy reviews....
