Corben's Blog - Content Area Literacies for Middle Grades

iCivics is a website that offers many resources for teachers. It organizes specific topics by units. I think this would be a good website for teachers to use because it is kid friendly. It is kid friendly in the aspect of the design. The characters and features of the videos and games are cartoons. This might allow for the students to not think of the information as school information, but rather a TV show or movie. This aspect also allows for the teacher to keep the students engaged. The teacher can search under a specific content or by standards. The best part is it is all free! The website is ran on donations and this is what keeps the information public.  All of the files are accessible once the teacher makes an account. Once you click on the link. It will take you to a google drive filled with multiple activities, charts, mini quizzes and readings for the students and teachers. This resource also has resources that satisfy learning objectives for high school classr...

  This week’s reading was about textbooks. As a social studies and science teacher, textbooks are a really good resource. They are a way to go over the text and information that is needed for the lesson. But, I also know that textbooks can be boring for most students, including myself. So for me as a future teacher, it is important to make sure the students are involved and engaged with the text.   I always found popcorn reading a way to keep me involved with the text. This is one method that supports what the author suggests as a good tool for classroom reading. They suggested to have the students “work in pairs, groups and teams at all stages of reading.” Working in groups would allow the students to have discussions after the reading to make sure that each of the students understood the reading or if not, the students are able to build off of other student’s prior knowledge or new knowledge of the text. I also think that using textbooks that have websites that assis...

This is a website that I found. It’s a PBS website. I think this would be useful for many math teachers. It provides many different lesson plans for math. The grade level is not specific so I think this would be useful for many teachers, not just middle school levels. The website has K-8 all the way up to high school different levels. There are many different types, some videos, interactive lessons, lesson plans, audio, and many different others.  As I was scrolling through the different activities I realized that the different activities could make math fun or possibly even a little easier. Since math is not one of my areas of interests, I think this could be useful for me if I was to one day be a math teacher. This could not only help me as a teacher by having the resources easily available, but also helping me understand the materials.   I went through one of the lessons for 5th grade interactive and one of the lessons was about recipes. This could allow the stud...

When I was younger I was a good reader. It was not until junior year of high school when I would read and be completely side tracked and not realize until I’m 30 pages in and stop and think about how I’m lost. Who is this character or what does this word even mean?  Going through this has taught me how I want to effectively read with the class. I think that doing readings in class is really helpful to the student. This allows for breaks when students do not understand. Me, the teacher, could give my own explanation. But one way that I think is very effective and also involving, is by allowing the other students to explain it. This would allow for them to learn from each other. This also tells me what they are getting from the passing and making sure the reading is understood by all. This could be done at the end of a section or chapter. The students could also raise their hands during the reading to allow me to know when they become confused. By doing this it would let t...