My kids are becoming interactive!

I received four new computers in my classroom about two weeks ago. All computers have Internet access. I have now incorporated these computers as a center or workstation in my classroom. My students are using the computers to reinforce phonics skills taught whole group. I even use the computers to help students with writing ideas and editing their work. The computers have been a wonderful asset. During whole group my students are doing better with the phonics skills that I used the computers to reinforce.
Here are the websites that I use and would like to use to continue to teach phonics skills and would like to teach reading skills:
http://www.starfall.com/
http://www.pbskids.org/
Also, I have a new idea for pushing for more interactive and creative writing: blogging. I believe this will also assist my students with keyboarding skills. I think that I will have a class blog and students will use the blogs to write and share creative fiction stories with their classmates. I will also have them to write about various things such as about their family, house, and their favorite holiday. Blogging will help students to become more relaxed with writing and as a result be creative.

#12 –Technology across the senses

Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences shed much light about my own capacity of learning, which is how I learn. During my freshmen year of my undergraduate degree program, I was challenged to learn how I learn. I was given a test that helped me to best identify it. Although the test, as far as I remember, did not mention Howard Gardner, but his principles such as the multiple intelligences were used to test the capacity in which a person learns best. From the results, I discovered that I learned best from doing this or having hands-on instruction. This multiple intelligence was kinesthetic. That was over five years ago. My second highest intelligence score was visual. I have changed as most people do, and throughout my undergraduate program I became more of a visual learner than a kinesthetic learner. If I saw it I could relate and process the information. I no longer majorly relied on the former intelligence of kinesthetic. I adapted to one of the highly traditional ways that universities teach now, which was through PowerPoint presentations and handouts. I became visual and connected the lectures (I scored poorly on verbal) to the visual text to learn at a pace that was most comprehensible for me.

I teach best using the intelligences of verbal and visual, and in some cases kinesthetic. I teach first grade and this is the grade where my students are really grasping phonics concepts because they are jumpstarting into becoming readers. I use a lot of writing and visuals to help them to connect with the text. But, to become good readers students need to be both phonemically aware (aware the words are made up of letters) and phonologically aware (aware that words and letters have sounds). Students must first be phonologically aware before phonemically aware. Therefore a lot of my teaching in reading has a lot to do with me saying, stretching, and sounding out words. Next, I connect what students hear to text. I write the letters and words that they hear for them to see and sound out. Teaching reading to first graders has challenged me to become a better auditory learner, because I have to pay attention to what I say and listen for specific things that students say. I use my kinesthetic abilities in mathematics because students need to experience firsthand the mathematical calculations and how they come about for them to understand.

Lesson plan objective:

The learner will listen for the sounds in various words, observe the strategies in blending words, and apply listening and sounding out techniques to decode words.

Verbal/Linguistic	Leapfrog Alphabet/Phonics Pad	http://www.starfall.com-/ Learn to read-links 1 through 5
Logical/ Mathematical	www.storyit.com/wgames/wgames.htm	www.readwritethink.org/Materials/Wordfamily/
Visual/Spatial	Jumpstart for First Grade	www.pbskids.org Word world
Bodily/Kinesthetic	http://www.starfall.com/ Learn to read links 1-5	www.pbskids.org Super why -sounds bingo
Musical/Rhythmic	Phonics CD with songs that sing the various sounds of the alphabet such as ABC rap	Rock and Learn: Songs for Phonics
Intrapersonal	Leapfrog Alphabet/Phonics Pad	www.pbskids.org Word world
Interpersonal	www.pbskids.org Super why-sounds bingo	www.pbskids.org Super why- freeze dancing rhyming
Naturalist	Plastic container	Sandwich bag
Existentialist	simulations	Recorded Reader’s theatre story