Fay School

Fay School in Southborough, MA has a fabulous website for their school library. I have used the Website evaluation lesson with my REAL time class. There's also a great Summer Reading list, a research toolkit, and a special section for teachers.

Perfectly Preschool

Perfectly Preschool: Preschool Activities
This site not only has great lesson plans for the little bitties, it also lists books, crafts, math and science connections, songs, and "extra" activities to go with each lesson. Includes lessons on leaves, Halloween, Thanksgiving, family, farms, pets, friends, as well as themes for each month. For instance, January is "Blustery Days" month: hibernation, snow, penguins, and arctic animals. March is "My Community": community helpers, my community, long long time ago, and transportation. This deserves a long look!

Books for Keeps

Books for Keeps: the Children's Book Magazine online
Articles, reviews, authors and illustrators, news, forums, Wow! An incredible search feature on the "review" page, allowing you to search by title, content, age range and date (of book). A British publication, but hopefully many of the books are available across the pond.

Literacy Connections

Literacy Connections "promotes literacy and a love of reading." All kinds of useful information here: comprehension, writing instruction, vocabulary, reader's theater, reading aloud, ESL, to name a few. Links to Reading Aloud tips for parents and teachers, Reading Comprehension strategies, links especially for reading teachers.

Teaching English with Picture Books

An English teacher shares her activity-based approach, which uses REAL picture books to teach lessons. She describes activities that she has used with any given picture book. She links to the RealBooks website (an English, as in Great Britain, website) which is for those helping children "enjoy learning English as a foreign or additional language."

Transforming American Education

A draft of the new 114-page report on the National Education Technology Plan (dated March 5, 2010), put out by the Office of Educational Technology, US Dept. of Education, entitled: Transforming American Education: Powered by Technology. Find it here.
A look at the table of contents (p. 2) shows chapters on Learning, assessment, connected teaching, infrastructure, infrastructure, and productivity.

Articles: School library/librarians key to Reading Success

Milwalkee Journal Sentinel, April 10, 2010: School Librarians Key to Reading

This from Canada. A new document to support school libraries in Ontario.

The Picnic Basket

The Picnic Basket, a blog created by Deborah Sloan, offers book reviews by book-lovers from all over the place! Check it out for all the latest!

Website of the Week

Goddess of YA is Teri Lesesne's website. She covers not only YA but Tween literature as well. She's the author of Naked Reading and has another book out there: Making the Match: The Right Book for the Right Reader at the Right Time, grades 4-12. Both books are available at Stenhouse.. She also has a blog: Live Journal, or The Goddess of YA Literature, which has a huge section on picture books.

Website of the Week

Awesome Library"organizes the web". Has over 37,000 resources. Catagories include Teachers, Kids, Teen, Parents, Librarians, and College. Subjects include The Arts, English, math, geography, literature, social studies, technology, reference, news and k-12 lessons. Go to the "Librarians" tab, then under that, another "Librarians" tab. Lots of interesting stuff here. The search box for the site has "Hot Topics" listed underneath, and the site is available in English, Spanish, French, German, and a "Talking" version (has to be downloaded).