Marina's Blog: Connecting Classroom Blogs

I followed Heather, Rochelle, Brianna, and Peter this week. After looking at my classmates blogs I learned that even though they all looked different we all have the same theme of using the blogs to better equip ourselfs for teaching. I noticed everyone is reading articles and looking at resources and taking away beneficial information from them. I like the idea of blogs and sharing them with classmates because we can see how everyone is interpreting information; it's a good way to see other perspectives and get ideas.

I also followed the scholastic blog. Since there are many authors on this blog I chose to look at an article called " Planning a Productive Summer for You and Your Students" by Beth Newingham.

Here is the link:

http://blogs.scholastic.com/top_teaching/2011/06/planning-a-productive-summer-for-you-and-your-students.html

Beth Newingham is an elementary teacher who is partnered with Scholastic; she publishes articles for them. Newingham presented 10 great ideas for the summer but my favorite part was her own classroom library! She posted a short virtual video on how she sets up her library. This was really interesting to me because I have taken a few literature classes already (and am taking one right now) and I have been hooked on children's literature and read alouds. I liked this author a lot so I checked out her blog and she has many great posting and ideas! I found a neat resource that she uses. It is called "Teacher Book Wizard" and it helps you find reading levels for books (and other books tools as well).

Here's the link directly to her library video:

http://blogs.scholastic.com/top_teaching/2009/10/classlibrary.html

Here's the link for the book wizard:

http://bookwizard.scholastic.com/tbw/homePage.do

Just thought I would also share a great book I just read about reading (which I'm sure a number of you have already read).