Curriki and PD 360?

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Permalink Reply by Anne Pemberton on March 28, 2009 at 9:37am

Lisa,

I have listed most of my website on Curriki, but since I am no longer teaching, I don't use it in a classroom. I only provide what I hope are useful resources for other teachers to use.

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Nielsen on March 29, 2009 at 9:58am

Hi Anne,

Can you share the link as well as how you used it when you were teaching?

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Permalink Reply by Anne Pemberton on March 29, 2009 at 11:01am

Lisa,

Various parts are used in various ways. For many the suggestions on how to use them on with the material, on another link, or stored under the "lessons" subdirectory. For a quick rundown:
1) Personalized books. Insert name and gender, and either display for child to read from screen, or print into booklet for independent reading. As printed books they can be read to the child, or read to a class in which the name child is a member of the class. Booklets can also be printed, one for each member of the class with his/her name in it, and they can be used as a class reading. Each child will read his or her name when it occurs.

2) Famous Americans. These can be used primarily online, to find out about whichever Famous Americans are in your curriculum. For Virginia teachers, there are pages the link to each one listed on the SOLs for given grade K-5. Other schools can make choices from the category pages (Famous Patriots and Founding Father, Famous Scientists, Famous New Englanders, Famous Native Americans, etc), or from the alphabetical list. There are two webquests that illustrate a project that can be used to have the class prepare a powerpoint project of the Famous American they study during the year. Also, for the Virginians, there are picture quizzes for the students to identify their Famous Americans from pictures. (I hope to make more quizzes for the categories down the road). For each page of a Famous American, there is a pictures of the person that can be clicked to print for paper reports or inserted in computer reports, a summary of their life or why they are important, some other pictures of the person or from their life (depending on availability), and links to more information on that person, usually the Wikipedia entry, other encyclopedic entries, the official website, any websites for museum, and such, and links to related information.

3) Lessons and Assessments are two subdirectories that started out with an overflow of stuff left over from my classroom days. Best to explore them and decide what will be useful to you.

4) Subject categories: There are subdirectories for each subject area: Language Arts, Math, Social Studies, and Science. All of them contain an index page that lists the categories available in each subject area. The category pages link to specific pages on the site of resources or links to resources for teaching one or more aspects of the subject. There are some real gems in there and some duds, depending on your perspective

5) Mrs. P's Links include a potpourri of resources such as games, arts and crafts, printables, teacher resources, music, videos, and more.

6) Monthly Newsletters are available since they were started in fall of 2007. Each months folks for whom I have an email address are advised of the availability of the newsletter. The actual newsletters are on the website. The list whatever new was created in the month. For example, the March newsletter will be going out in the next two days, listing everything new this month. Drop me an email and you will be added to the newsletter notification, or just check out the newsletters when you are on the site.

I think that pretty much sums up what is there. For things that are not obvious, I have directions how to use it. Many things, tho, it is up to the user to determine how it will fit in with their lessons.

Oh, the basic link is: http://www.educationalsynthesis.org

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