So for those of you who are educators like me, well like I eventually will be, I am sure you are always looking for ways to improve your classroom.  I’ve been browsing the web all morning and I’ve found really awesome ideas!

One thing I found particularly interesting was an assignment called “Learning to Blog Using Paper”.  This teacher developed an idea where the students start brainstorming ideas for their blog but start it on paper first.  First, the teacher asks them to think of ideas that they can talk about everyday, something they love and are passionate about.  They write about it in class.  The next day, they get a heavy piece of card stock and they write their “final draft” of their initial blog with decorations that relate to it.  Next, the students go around to each blog and comment on it with post-its!  Offer advice, what they like, what needs work, etc.  This way, when they go to the computer lab and actually put their blogs on the web, they are polished and look good!  I thought this was a great idea!

I also found a page that has 50 alternatives to the book report.  I love this because it offers 50 fun activities that do the same thing as the boring, traditional book report!  There’s ideas such as talk shows, college application, word collage, twenty questions, and scrapbook.  One thing that is on here that I love and always wanted to try is a found poem.  It has to be at least twenty lines and children create a poem from lines of a book.  This causes them to use textual evidence and pick out the most important information of a text.  Another great website like this is 103 things to do before/during reading.

We need to remember to involve critical thinking in our classrooms!  This site helps you come up with good questions and activities to do so!

Who doesn’t love a good debate?  This site offers good ways to incorporate debates into your classroom.  I really  enjoyed these.  This site also offers a way to incorporate an argumentative essay after a debate, pretty cool!

Lastly, I found this really cool classroom activity that can go with anything. I saw it done two ways: with a beach ball and with a pinwheel.  I think either way is good, but the beach ball might be more fun because it offers students a chance to play/get active in the class.  Each section of the ball or pinwheel has a different question such as, “the setting is…”, “the problem is…”, “the main character is…”, etc.  Obviously, you can change the questions if you want as you write them, but that is what the example is.  I really liked this because it keeps kids on their toes not knowing what their question will require them to know!

Hope I helped!  I found these ideas extremely useful and I hope you do too!  Here are some cool blogs I found also.  I cannot wait to have my own class so I can start blogging about what I do and what I think is a good classroom technique!