One of my favorite sites to visit to find out about new resources is KB… Konnected. The author, Karen Bolotin, has another site that is designed to enrich “students who finish early” – KB…Konnected Kids. This site has a wide range of interesting categories, such as “Build It!” and “Make it Move!” I haven’t had a chance to explore the many links, but I did end up discovering another site through the “Games” button that I know I will be sharing with my Gifted and Talented students. It’s a site called “Smart Kit”, which touts itself as “School-Safe Games and Puzzles”. It has many cute logic games on it that I know my students will enjoy. I want to thank Karen Bolotin, as well as the team behind Smart Kit, for providing some great educational links for our kids.
Children’s Eyes on Earth is sponsoring an international youth photo contest. To enter, you must be 17 or under, and have parental or guardian consent. There are two themes: “I Love Nature” and “I Fear Pollution”, and each participant must upload at least one photo for each theme. The deadline for this contest is September 15th. Even if you don’t plan to have your students formally enter this contest, these would be neat themes to use for a classroom display of photographs taken by the children. It will also be interesting to visit the site once the winning entries are posted, and to discuss the subjects of the images. Be sure to watch the video on the home page that features world-renowned professional photographer Reza explaining the concept of this contest.
Dinner, Not Art is both a website and a free iPad app. It’s delightfully silly, but also encourages creativity and charity. Every noodle that is used in the virtual art will result in 10 noodles being donated to the charity Feeding America by Kraft until the end of this year. This is similar to the concept found at FreeRice.
Be sure to watch the short video on the website to learn about the reasoning behind the creation of this app.
In the app, the user can choose the shape of the macaroni noodles as well as the color to paint them. You can place them however you like and even change their size. You can also draw things on the rest of the page. Once you are finished, you can “glue” your pieces to the paper, and hang your art on a virtual refrigerator.
Kids young and old would enjoy this app. To deepen the conversation, students could do some research on Feeding America or some math to figure out the amount of macaroni art that needs to be done to create a real meal. Maybe they could research other companies that have offered deals like this and find out “what’s in it for them”.
I alluded to Poetry Pairing a long time ago when I posted about the New York Times Learning Network, but I think it is well-deserving of its very own post. Poetry Pairing is a collaborative effort between the New York Times and the Poetry Foundation. Each week, a poem and a current article are selected to pair together. Comparing the articles to the poems, which are all selected from the American Life in Poetry Project, can bring some very rich conversation into the classroom. By juxtaposing poetry, some of which was written centuries ago, with current events, readers (or listeners, if you use a text-t0-speech program) can examine the common themes and trends they might observe. They can debate the messages of each piece, and whether or not they complement each other or markedly contrast.
I selected this particular pairing because of its poem, written by an 8 year old, and its article, which spoke to my heart, about this process of creating that children so enjoy – and the process of sifting through these creations that parents must endure. It is a particularly poignant example of the interesting weekly combinations brought about on this site.
Even if your students are not quite old enough to appreciate the posts found on the New York Times site, I think that this is a lovely idea for a lesson that could be brought to younger students as well. Using shorter poems and current stories that are relevant to them, a teacher could integrate many higher order thinking skills using this framework.
If you have not heard of Universal Design for Learning, also known as UDL, you might want to check out my post here that gives an introduction. You can also choose Universal Design for Learning from one of the categories on the right for additional posts on this topic.
UPDATE 6/10/2020: Unfortunately, the resource below is no longer available.
The UDL Tech Toolkit is a Glog that has links to a variety of technology tools to make learning accessible to all students. Even if you have not heard of UDL, or are not ready to plunge into Universal Design for Learning full speed ahead, you will find that there are many useful resources included in this Glog. I would definitely recommend bookmarking the UDL Tech Toolkit, so that you will have a ready reserve of sites that can help you to engage students with many different abilities.
