Scholastic Thanksgiving Resources for K-12

Scholastic has developed a collection of many great resources to help students learn about the Pilgrims, Native Americans, and the first Thanksgiving.  The first step is go to the Sign-Up/Home page and register your class.  You will receive a diary letter from different Thanksgiving characters in your email inbox during the month of November. 

The voyage on the Mayflower section allows students to take an interactive journey that the pilgrims experienced or they can tour the ship. 

 

Scholastic also provides implementation plans for K-2, 3-5, and 6-12 to help teachers use these resources effectively in their instruction. 

Finally, Scholastic has partnered with Plimoth Plantation to produce three video tours of Plimoth Plantation, a Wampanoag homesite, and a Pilgrim homesite. They will also be adding a Mayflower virtual fieldtrip.  This is a great set of resources which will bring Thanksgiving to life in your classroom through technology.

 

This following video I found on History.com.  It shows the Pilgrim's route they took and deconstructs the Mayflower.  



2 Tools to Help Eliminate Distractions Around YouTube Videos

YouTube is wonderful tool to use in your classroom.  What isn’t so great: all of the garbage that can come along with it (i.e. advertising, comments, related videos…in short-distractions). Here are two resources that will allow you to safely view and share YouTube videos without all the garbage.

YouTubeXL- This is a service that YouTube provides that lets you watch videos on large screens without the ads and comments.

Safe Share TV is a fantastic way to share You Tube videos with your students. Safe Share TV removes all distracting and offensive elements that surround a video on You Tube and allows you to share the video with a unique link. Safe Share TV also gives you the option to crop videos before sharing them.

Implementation:

• Spark interest in certain topics
• Make real world connections to various topics
• Explain concepts to students

(adapted from original post found on http://ilearntechnology.com/?p=4695)

Utilizing YouTube and Discovery Ed Videos in Your SMART Notebook Lessons

Video is a powerful tool that you can use within your classroom for many purposes.  Today we are going to focus on how to put these videos into your SMART Board lessons so you can easily access them during your instruction.  Our distritct has access to Discovery Ed and the other type I will show is YouTube.  I will show how these videos can be downloaded and embedded, and also include some implementation ideas.  Please remember when you are using a video this way that you should give credit within your lesson to the original video creator.  This is a great way to model digital citizenship to our students.

YouTube:

Discovery Ed:

Implementation Ideas:

• Create lessons utilizing videos for discussion or to build anticipation for the content
• Build your SMART Notebook documents to include these videos to avoid buffering/having them become unavailable
• A great way to have students create presentations so they can use video without having to wait to view it during the presentation (remember to cite the video)
• A way to include only the segments of a video you want within your instruction instead of having to search and find the exact spot within the video

STEM Resources-Lesson Plans, Activities, and More

I came across this site last year and thought it would be helpful in the implementation of STEM in some of our buildings.  This site provides lesson plans, resources, and activities to use in your classroom.  There are some great ideas for any grade level and I hope this site can be helpful in your planning.

 

eGFI-Dream Up the Future