Busy Teacher's Cafe

Catherine Gonzalez

ED638-41

January 11, 2019

Effective Literacy #7

            Teachers love when you can find resources and strategies all on one page. Busy Teacher’s Café offers both. Busy Teacher’s Café is geared towards teachers who teach Kindergarten through 6^th grade. They provide strategies that teachers can create on their own to enhance their teaching.

            When you are on the main page of Busy Teacher’s Café, you are greeted with 6 tabs. You have a theme, strategies, printable, resources, email, and shop tab. Busy Teacher’s Café provides a monthly resource page to help find information and tools for seasonal or monthly ideas. Each tab is filled with resources for teachers to use for students K-6. It is easy to navigate through the pages. When clicking on the “Strategies” tab, it has 5 subcategories. The categories that can help teachers are for literacy. They provide literacy strategies, literature guides, author studies, literacy centers/stations, and classroom management. Literacy Strategies has 3 topics that it covers which is Reading, Writing, and Word Work. Busy Teacher’s Café has ton of information for teachers to read through to provide differentiated instruction for students to succeed in Reading and Writing.

            I explored the “Printables” page and it provides teachers with worksheets to use as guided practice or independent work for students. The categories under the Printable tab is Reading, Writing, Language Arts, Math, Management & Forms, Seasonal/Holiday, Spanish, and Literacy Centers. I clicked on the “Literacy Center” tab and it redirected me to where they give ideas to implement and manage literacy centers.  I love this site because its broken into categories and its very detailed. This website is great for all teachers not just those who are starting their career but also for the seasoned teachers as well.

Website Link: http://www.busyteacherscafe.com/index.html

Book Adventure

Catherine Gonzalez

ED638-41

January 9, 2019

Effective Literacy #6

            Students love being rewarded when they do something correct or when there is an incentive at the end of their work. Book Adventure offers that program where students read a book and is rewarded in the end.  It is an interactive reading management program. Their goal for students who log in is to be inclusive of the different student learning style and provide a variety of assessment tools for those students who are not test takers. Book Adventures offers over 15,000 book quizzes. Custom book list is created for students based on the theme and their grade level. For young readers and ELL students, there is a text to speech for students to hear the text orally. Within this program, there are built-in rewards such as virtual pet play, game coins, and game page. For teachers, there are printable reading activities and an interactive daily reading log. Teachers can use this daily reading log as a tracker to see what stories the students read. Teachers are the administrators and can control the student’s profiles. You can provide program customization settings, have daily reports, assign assignments to students, and teachers will be able to message their students directly. Book Adventures connects with students with personalized engagement, bridge technological divide, and reward reading achievement. Students are able to build on a list of books to read. It is free to join but certain items on the website are premium features.

            Website: https://bookadventure.com/book-adventure-book-lists/?gILI=2083#list

Visuwords

Catherine Gonzalez

ED638-41

January 7, 2019

Effective Literacy Website #5

Vocabulary is important in students reading comprehension. Students will not be able to understand what they are reading without knowing what most of the words mean. As students learn new vocabulary from what they are reading, it expands their oral vocabulary and being exposed to new words. When introduced to new words and they know the definition of a word then their comprehension improves as well.

Visuwords is an online graphical dictionary where users can look up words to find their relationships to other words. When you type in any word on the search bar on Visuwords, immediately different words pop up that are similar to the word. Each word that is connected to the original word has a colored circle. The color of the circles varies depending on the words that are associated to the original word. The 4 grammar of speech are noun, adjective, verb, and adverb. Each has a color to distinguish between the words. Also, the lines that connect the original word with the similar word or definition has meanings as well. When you hover over the similar definition or words it has pop-up definition for that bubble.

This website is a dictionary and a thesaurus in one. It benefits writers, students, teachers and artist. It is a free and no membership required. When you narrow down a specific word it gives you more details rather than type in a simple word like dog or cat.

Website Link: https://visuwords.com