Read. Write. Think

I was searching through several websites this week, trying to find ones that connected nicely with my inquiry project. I didn't realize how much material there is for English teachers. One website would lead me to the next. With each click of the mouse, I was creating my own research story. I don't even remember what I googled, but I ended up coming across TEWT (Teaching English with Technology), a fantastic website for English teachers.

For those of you who want to play around with it now, here is the link:

http://tewt.org/lessonplansites.html

I searched through the numerous lesson plans the site offers for numerous common texts that are taught in English classrooms. There is information for poetry, ESL, grammar, and other links for more lesson plans. I had a choice: do I continue on this site or explore some more? I ended up following the link to another site called read.write.think. It is a collaborative website created by the International Reading Association and NCTE. This specific website concentrates on connecting technological lessons to the standards. It is great for public school teachers.

Of course, I immediately clicked on the Student Materials tab and started playing all of the interactive games. Who knew that there is an actual website that helps you create book covers! My favorite was the fractured fairy tale tool. It first helps define a fractured fairy tale, and then helps the student create a fractured fairy tale of their own. By entering information, the tool produces a hilarious fractured fairy tale. The student can decide what to keep, change, or discard so the story becomes their own. It would be interesting to see if students learn fractured fairy tales as effectively using the tool as they would sitting in a group with a pen and paper, writing out their own tale.

After wasting a significant amount of my "school work time" I decided to move on to the lesson plans. They are set up by grade level, making it easy to sift through the elementary lessons. I came across a specific lesson that really caught my attention. The topic is "Protest Songs" and the lesson included students looking through Wiki pages for specific songs. The students are required to write down the sources the author used, located at the end of each wiki page. Then the students do their own research and see what materials were used (scholarly/popular). This is a great lesson when it comes to Wikipedia because as the lesson specifically states, almost every student will run across one or two sources that are not very good for research and informative purposes. However, this is not a lesson on why students should never site Wikipedia, it is a lesson about understanding protest songs through research. Long lesson short, the students eventually write their own wiki page on a pre-established class wiki about their specific protest song. Then the students classify each song in order to find the significance of the general protest song. What a fantastic lesson!

I think the reason behind my excitement is because this lesson allows students to take control of their own lesson. We all search wikipedia in order to find the latest information about our topic, but most of us don't actually write responses to the wiki's or correct information we know to be false. This lesson proves to students that even they can participate in an information gathering site. They can be the authors of their own Wikis just as the protestors of authors of their own songs. Any lesson that causes a students to read, write, and think is a great lesson. The three components of English are not separate so they should not be treated as such. Sometimes I find teachers organizing class lessons in such a way that each time slot is compartmentalized - Reading. Writing. Thinking. Instead, this website encourages English teachers to mesh the three components of learning into one - ReadWriteThink. Every lesson incorporates all three, so that students are engaged in numerous activities at once without realizing that they are reaching higher levels of thinking for an extended period of time. I highly recommend this website for that reason, not to mention the easy step-by-step lesson plans that are easy to understand and accessible to all teachers. This is definitely one site that I am keeping bookmarked for future use.