Wednesday 1 August 2012

Common Core E/LA Templates

Tulare County, CA has Sequoia National Park, Mount Whitney, and Kings Canyon National Park. I want to go and see it all!

This post, however, is about the amazing work that has been done by their Office of Education in compiling a vast set of resources for implementing the English & Language Arts Common Core State Standards. Dr. Lori Digisi reminded us at a recent statewide TAS meeting that as educators, we should not reinvent the wheel, but rather find the work that others have done already and build on it. My very-smart-teacher daughter found this amazing site, and I invite you to start building!

Joanna says that the templates found on this page are the best Common Core resource she has discovered thus far as a Reading & LA teacher. After clicking on the link, you simply have to scroll down the page to "ELA CCCSS Templates" and select your grade level. The templates include vocabulary, question stems, and a place to write teaching strategies and notes. Here is the page for 3rd Grade Standard 1:
http://www.tcoe.org/ERS/CCSS/ELA/Templates_03.pdf
Unfortunately, TCOE hasn't made as much progress in Math, but I'm hoping one of my blog readers will point me to a resource like this one, so I can pass it along. In the meantime, I'll be hunting, too.

We Give Books

A quick morning post about a really cool website: We Give Books is an initiative of the Pearson Foundation. More than 200 books, both fiction and nonfiction, are available to read online, and it's all FREE! True, it's a marketing tool for Pearson's publishing companies, but free is free, right?
         
I can imagine the site's being used at a reading center in the classroom, and by the way, there are reading extension activities linked to the CCSS provided, as well as some learning guides, craft ideas, and an interesting-looking Children's Literature Review Blogging Project. How could you use it in your class?