the media window

The Scholastic website offers a wealth of materials for everyone. Here’s a quick look at a few areas of their online presence.
Lesson Plans: Right away I saw a lesson plan for a book that I love to read to students but have not used too often as I have never developed a lesson plan of my own for it. The teacher who wrote the lesson plan for David Shannon’s A Bad Case of Stripes, Gayle Berthiaume (a distinguished teacher from Becker, MN) suggests that it be read during the first week of school as an avenue for discussion about worries that students may have, concerns about feeling different, or even being bullied. She then has the students draw pictures of themselves in the manner of the girl in the story. They can decorate their portraits with worries or concerns that they may have or with something that they love doing. I like this simple idea and may try it with the 2nd and 3rd grade classes that I see.
Next I decided to search for possible lessons using graphic novels.  We have a number of graphic novels that I have purchased already and the students are interested in them and enjoy checking them out. There will be an artist in residence coming in awhile who is helping students create their own graphic novels, which is why I offered to introduce the genre to the students.  My search proved fruitful as I was able to print a discussion guide titled “Using Graphic Novels with Children & Teens: Including BONE by Jeff Smith“. I will be able to read this and learn from it and can also share it with the teachers in the building whose students are working with the artist in residence. I also found that Scholastic has a wonderful interactive website called Amulet that I am looking forward to sharing with students, as it allows students to create their own graphic novel stories with the characters who dwell in the world of Amulet.
Teaching Strategies
If you click on the Teaching Strategies tab in Scholastic, you will be able to link to a series of short articles that relate to using digital cameras in the primary grades. The first article gives you good suggestions on what price and type of digital camera to buy, and the next is a handy reminder for teaching your young students ahead of time how to care for and be careful of the digital camera. A third article gives some great ideas on actual activities to do with your students. One that I would love to share with the first grade teachers in my building is an alphabet activity, where the students make their own ABC book from digital pictures they take. The final article had suggestions on how to involve students in altering their own digital images. The author suggested that even third grade could use Adobe Elements, so I will consider that. I usually have my fourth and fifth grade students use that digital imaging tool, but I am certainly open to the idea. One tip that I truly appreciate is having the youngest students use KidPix after taking their pictures. I had never thought of using KidPix as a digital imaging tool, so I was really interested to see that as a suggestion for working with younger students after they took the pictures, and had to do something with them. I will definitely be trying that out with first grade this year. All in all, some good ideas here in Teaching Strategies!
Librarians:
Since I’m an elementary media specialist, I decided to see what there was for me in the Librarian’s area of Scholastic. You need to click on the More tab to find it in the drop down menu. I’m somewhat familiar with the business end of the Scholastic website for librarians, so it was interesting to explore what else was there for me. The Weekly Web Finds by Kerry Prendergast offered links to various items that caught the eye of the writer of this column, such as government papers and cute animal pictures. I then linked to another column called Kid Lit Kit: Your Toolkit for Teaching with Books. You will find plenty of interesting author and book links to read about. In the entry I read, Jeremy Brunaccioni (the author of Kid Lit Kit) revisited Jan Brett’s website and reminded us that this ever generous author has tons of new things for teachers to use in their classrooms. He also mentioned 39 Clues, which is a new series by Scholastic, so I will be checking that out soon as it looks very interesting. I decided to subscribe to this blog as it really looks as if there are consistently good links here.
Last but not least, I grabbed the widget for Scholastic’s Teacher Book Wizard and put it on the media center website for my school. It’s a nifty online tool that helps you to “find and level books for students”. What’s nice is that it searches for books from all publishers, not just Scholastic.

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