I first got an interactive whiteboard in my classroom in 2008. I was teaching Prep at the time and it was a steep learning curve to discover how I could best use it to engage my students and improve learning outcomes.
Fast forward three years and I am teaching Grade Two in an open classroom with Kathleen Morris. I love the enormous range of interactive websites and tools available for my students, and while I could manage to teach without an IWB, I wouldn’t want to! It is difficult to think of any lessons where Kathleen and I don’t utilise the IWB and our planning documents include many links to websites each week.
We use the IWB during our twenty minute blogging session every day, and it is often used for our CAFE reading strategy too. We also regularly use the IWB during our reading groups each week. We find websites for the children to use that either link to our weekly reading strategy or reinforce an ongoing skill. Thus, our literacy focuses are reinforced and practised consistently. These sites are saved in our favourites folder on the IWB, so students can access them at other times too.
Below are just a few of the games our students have used this year.
Read Write Think (Construct a Word) – This was used by some of our weaker readers, who were focussing on using beginning and ending sounds in words when reading.
Wall of Words – This game focuses on sequencing sentences correctly and adding correct punctuation. There are two levels of difficulty.
Alphabet Soup – Students need to read and comprehend a question and think of a possible answer using jumbled letters.
Synonyms Sam’s Lab – Great for extending students’ vocabulary by having them think of synonyms for a range of words.
The Magic Key (Code Calling) – Another good synonym game where students need to replace words with similar meanings.
Stories of the Dreaming – Our Integrated Studies topic this term is “Aboriginal Australia”, so we had students watch some dreamtime stories and formulate questions about the stories to ask each other.
What websites do your students use during Literacy?
Hi Kelly,
What a fantastic post full of resources. I’ll definitely be filing these away for a later date/to share with my colleagues in grade 1/2 back at work.
I teach a class of preps and I’m trying to use my IWB a lot more frequently. I use it for whole class reading activities/small reading group activities that I’ve created on ActivInspire, but I’ve also used a couple of useful websites:
Mighty Books – http://www.mightybook.com/ (online stories read aloud)
Magnetic Poetry – kids.magpogames.com/ (for use with my higher ability students)
Reading Games – http://www.learningtoday.com/corporate/reading-games.asp
Storyline Online – http://www.storylineonline.net/ (small videos of stories read aloud by members of the Screen Actors Guild Foundation)
Starfall – http://www.starfall.com/
CBeebies – http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/
A lot of those are online stories – which are very useful for engaging my students and are great conversation starters. And when I can’t find a website with an activity that’s appropriate for what we’re looking at I’ll try and create an activity.
And, while this isn’t a website, I also use the IWB each morning as a student roll – students come in, unpack and then choose an image (usually a fun, animated .gif) to cover their name, effectively checking themselves into the classroom. The students get to take turns nominating a theme for a roll each week.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this post to look for more useful Literacy-based websites!
Stefanie
Hi, i’m teaching prep as well. Just wondering if you are using the daily 5? Love to chat, i’m feeling a wee bit lost!
despinaparakas@yahoo.com.au