Hot Websites May 2005
By Linda Lindroth

May flowers are blooming and summer is just around the corner. Make these last few weeks more meaningful with these great resources from the web.

KidsReads
www.kidsreads.com
KidsReads is a part of The Book Report Network, whose goal is to support and encourage reading. Features include monthly book themes and topics for readers of all ages, with book lists, thoughtful reviews, author interviews and reader surveys. Sign up for the KidsReads newsletter for features and highlighted book reviews. Students can respond to the Question of the Month by posting their comments online.

The Author link has biographies, book reviews and excerpts for dozens of authors organized alphabetically. There is even a Series database to help students find book titles that are a part of a series they love. The Reviews are short overviews to help students make selections from a summer reading book list or when visiting the library.

Don't miss Author Birthdays, which groups birthdays by month with active links to those authors who have a biography in the Author section. Every teacher will want to print this monthly list for their Calendar bulletin board. There is also a Write to Your Favorite Author index with addresses for fan mail. Send your students home for the summer with two or three authors from the school year (and maybe even one or two authors from next year's curriculum), encouraging them to research the authors as part of their summer learning log (see this month's "How To…").

Want to start a summer Book Club? This link offers guides for getting started, running a club and choosing a book to read. There are also a variety of book club guides for selected titles, complete with discussion questions, excerpts and timelines.

Trivia offers questions and answers for numerous KidsReads titles. Trivia also links to related web resources, extending the book/author study. Games contains printable word scrambles and crossword puzzles for vocabulary from many featured books on this website. The left-hand margin of all pages cross-links items from each resource contained in the KidsReads website. This is a must visit for class literature studies and a perfect follow-up to National Library Week (April 10-16).

The Great Plant Escape
www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/gpe
Here's a tremendous life science unit for a culminating fourth and fifth grade science lesson. With six cases, students are involved in fact-finding, searching for clues and identifying key elements of plant life as they solve the cases.

Each case consists of a mission, a case brief with goals and ideas, facts of the case for background, mysteries with questions to research and activities to reinforce learning. The Teachers Guide is an in-depth set of lesson plans for implementing each of the cases in science instruction.

My students really loved investigating each of the topics about plants, soil and seeds. An interactive glossary also makes it easier for kids to manage their new vocabulary and the related links offer an abundance of additional activities and resources for your curriculum.

Reading Quest
www.readingquest.org
The struggle to match student learning with national, state and local standards is a constant challenge. This is sometimes even more so in social studies, where the range of information can be so great and the reading requirements can be even greater. Reading Quest offers a simple framework with keys for developing comprehension and strategies to make the skill acquisition easier.

With more than two dozen strategies for reading comprehension, this teacher resource is outstanding in its organization, lesson guides and printable handouts/masters. Nearly every strategy has a detailed lesson plan and a blackline handout to help make the skill meaningful for your students. The graphic organizers include charts for ABC brainstorming, definition maps, Venn diagrams, story maps and more.

This is a wonderful tool for end-of-the-year review. I even have this one filed for those "lazy summer days" when I am looking for materials to get ready for back-to-school. I hope you have a wonderful break.

Linda K. Lindroth is Technology Editor and Web Coordinator for Teaching K-8. She is also a Technology Resource Teacher in a K-5 computer lab in Lexington, KY.