Elementary Technology

I am not sure where the name Mrs. Pancake comes from, but I do know that this website is full of resources for teachers. The site contains “doodads” which are down-loadable, printable educational resources for parents, teachers and children. It is perfect for the beginning of the school year when you might be thinking about how to fill up that bulletin board or replacing some outdated posters or just making your classroom look a little better. The site is arranged in categories such as literacy, numeracy, classroom helpers etc.  Some doodad examples are:  colorful alphabets, number lines, borders, numbers, days of the week,  states of matter, faces of dice, clocks, seasons and one of my favorites…question words.  You can search by category or by tags and if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, Mrs. Pancake is also looking for new ideas!     http://mrspancake.com/index.php

If you are looking to create a game for your class but you don’t know how to get started, look no further. This site contains lots of game templates that can be customized to fit your content area. They all use PowerPoint so it is something you can also use on the SMART Board. Games can be a great way to review content, to make curriculum exciting and to engage students.  http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/PPT-games/

Earth Day is coming up and what better way to teach the kids about conserving than to use the SMART Board instead of paper and pencil tasks. These 3 lessons are full of interactive activities that will be lots of fun while also reinforcing those concepts that Earth Day is all about.  Rainforest has beautiful illustrations along with rich content to guide the students through the layers of the rainforest while they learn about the plants and animals that live there. Rainforest by Liz Koehler

The Glyph Poster allows students to use the notebook software to create an Earth Day poster while using pictorial forms of data collection. Perfect for integrating math skills with social studies content.  glyph-poster by Denise Sozda

Celebrate Earth Day is a comprehensive introduction to the holiday that is perfect for kindergartners and first graders. celebrate-earth-day by Christine Wolzl

Words allow us to have language. Language allows us to communicate. This website lets us know how important it is for us to use words. You must take a look at this site. It will astound you with it’s visual appeal. You can adopt words, sign up to receive a word of the day or simply explore the meaning of new words. How about asking your students to adopt a new word each week or assign an adoption as a homework assignment. There are many ways this site can be used to help extend a student’s vocabulary. Take a look at Save the Words!

Remember those little magnets you could play with on the refrigerator?  You could make words with individual letters? Or when you got a little older, you could string words together into phrases or even sentences? Well now you can do the same think, only online of course. Magnetic Poetry gives you a choice of 4 different kits of magnetic words on your own virtual refrigerator. Each kit is based on a different theme such as First Words, Storymaker and Best Friends. All you have to do is drag the words you choose over to the front of the refrigerator and create. This has endless possibilities in the classroom especially if you use this on the SMART Board. Imagine giving your class tasks at the refrigerator that can be differentiated for each student. You could ask one student to create a sentence using an action word. Or another student might be asked to create a sentence using spelling words.  And of course you can change the tasks with the different themes too.