A Good Tool for Writing Reflections on Stories
Scholastic's Character Scrapbook offers a good template that elementary school students can use to write about and reflect on the characters in their favorite stories. The template is quite simple to use. Students enter the name of a story and the name of their favorite character on the first page. On the next pages students list ten attributes of the character. The Character Scrapbook also allows students to create pictures of their favorite characters. Students can write about and create images of animal characters too. Applications for Education: Scholastic's Character Scrapbook could be a great tool for getting students to think about their favorite stories. The Character Scrapbook has an easy print option so that you can print and display all of your students' works in your classroom.
Parts of Speech Quest
ABCya offers hundreds of fun and educational games for elementary school kids. Parts of Speech Quest is one of the games that was recently featured on ABCya's homepage. Parts of Speech Quest is a series of nine games that, depending upon your age, will remind you of Legend of Zelda or Minecraft.
Each of the nine games in Parts of Speech Quest requires students to navigate through a fictional world. Throughout the game students will be confronted by gatekeepers, locked doors, and other obstacles. To get past these obstacles students have to answer questions about the parts of speech. The nine games in Parts of Speech Quest are: Nouns, Verbs, Adverbs, Adjectives, Pronouns, Prepositions, Conjunctions, Interjections, and Final review. Applications for Education: Parts of Speech Quest games can be played on laptops, Chromebooks, and iPads. The games don't require students to register in order to play the games. These games could be good to add to "free time" or "practice" page on a classroom website or as materials in your Google Classroom.
Supercharge Student Self-Editing Skills with this Writing Checker for Google Docs
Analyzing your own writing with a critical eye can be hard to do. I know, I try to do it every day and I still miss things that a fresh set of eyes quickly picks up. Like me, students often struggle to critically analyze their own writing. Peer editing is one solution to that problem. Another solution is to use an online writing checker the one that JoeZoo offers as a Google Docs Add-on. JoeZoo's Monkey Checker is a customizable tool that students can use to evaluate their own written work and teachers, of all subjects, to save a lot of time assessing student work. Five Key Features of JoeZoo's Monkey Checker
JoeZoo's Monkey Checker is a part of the JoeZoo Google Docs Add-on that you can get right here. Once it is installed you can begin customizing how it works for you and your students.
You can pick the spelling, grammar, and punctuation rules that you want the Monkey Checker to identify. Many services will identify all errors, but if you want students to be responsible for self-identifying small errors and let Monkey Checker identify the bigger errors, you can have it do that. Or you can use the customization's to set different rules for different classes. For example, I might have Monkey Checker flag all errors for my ninth grade students and only have it flag bigger errors for my eleventh grade students.
Many grammar, spelling, and punctuation checkers will automatically fix errors for students. Monkey Checker only suggests corrections. I like that because it forces students to look at their mistakes and make corresponding corrections.
Errors are color coded within Google Docs. Errors of the same type are color coded and grouped for easy identification by students and teachers. This makes it easy to quickly identify the type of mistake that a particular student makes most often.
The Monkey Checker tracks students' self-editing progress and reports that information to teachers in a word cloud format.