Educational Information Sources Online

Some resources online for Readers Theater that I've come across.

Internet Resources For Conducting Reader's Theater

Aaron Shephard's Readers Theater Scripts

Gander Academy Readers Theater Scripts

Education World Readers Theater Resources

Fiction Teachers.com

If you're looking for a decent site to set up an educational blog for yourself or your students, Edublogs is the site for you. The site uses WordPress open source software, which is a very user-friendly and robust application. You can have multiple users, categorize, and password protect posts with WordPress. There are a number of templates to choose from and you can upload audio, video, or document files you would like to share with others (with a size limit). I love WordPress, and the best part is you don't have to have your own host. Edublogs hosts your educational blog for you.

I came across this really fun little site called Scrapblog. It allows you to post photos in a scrapbook type format. There are all kinds of neat backgrounds and decorative touches you can use.

Of course this site, Modern American Poets, is very comprehensive as well as easily navigable. Click on the letter of the last name of the poet to get to the link for that poet.

A number of classic poets and poems are listed on this site. It's fairly easy to navigate, although the authors are only listed by last name, rather than their whole name.

I found this early elementary reading site that has some great online reading activities for beginning readers. There are activities for ABCs, early readers, comics, puzzles, plays, non-fiction and selections based on holidays. Nice site to help kids with reading as well as learning to navigate web resources.

The Poetry Archive is chock full of recordings of poets reading their works. If you're interested in poetry or teaching poetry with students, this is a great resource for audio files.

The link to this compilation of information about teaching critical thinking skills was posted on one of my library listservs. I thought it ties in nicely with information literacy skills education. There are articles, ideas, rubrics and more.

Here's a wonderful site called the Favorite Poem Project. A short description from the site:

Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, founded the Favorite Poem Project shortly after the Library of Congress appointed him to the post in 1997. Since its launch, the Favorite Poem Project has been dedicated to celebrating, documenting and promoting poetry's role in Americans' lives.

During the one-year open call for submissions, 18,000 Americans wrote to the project volunteering to share their favorite poems — Americans from ages 5 to 97, from every state, of diverse occupations, kinds of education and backgrounds. From those thousands of letters and emails, we've culled several enduring collections.

Once again, National Poetry Month is almost upon us (April). The Academy of the American Poets has a number of resources on its site, including a Poetry Read-A-Thon for classrooms. You can download the official logo at the site, and also order posters to display. Another neat part of this event is having a poem emailed to you every day for the month. You can sign up here.