Summer Web Explorations for Parents and Teachers

Parents

Explore the following web resources to discover tools and activities you can share with your children to make summer learning fun!

• Celebrate! Visit National Today a web site that catalogs all of the celebrations associated with everyday of the year. Discover a reasons to turn an ordinary summary day into a day of celebration.
• Wander the Solar System. Download the free iPad/iOS app, Night Sky: A Guide to the Universe, to allow your child to experience an augmented reality tour of planets, moons, rocket bodies, satellites, and much more.
• Current Events for Readers at All Skill Levels. TweenTribune is a current events web site published by the Smithsonian Museum. Select an article you want to read and then select a Lexile Level to alter the text complexity. A very helpful tool for reluctant readers!
• Make Your Own Comic Strips. Many children enjoy drawing and writing their own comic strips. Explore tools such as Canva Comic Strips, Make Beliefs Comix, ToonyTool, or Witty Comics to find a suitable design palette.
• Maker Camp. Looking to engage your child in a summer camp without the travel? Maker Camp is a virtual six-week camp, hosted by Make Magazine, to young Makers interested in DIY, making, creating, crafting, hacking, tinkering, and learning.
• Road Trip. Planning a trip this summer? Roadtrippers is an app and web site tool for plotting your journey and identifying interesting sightseeing stops along the way. A fun way for the entire family to be involved in trip planning.
• Graphing. Help you child learn how to make graphs to illustrate math concepts using the free web site Create a Graph. Helpful for children of all ages.
• Multimedia Books. Storyline Online is a repository of award-winning children’s books. The books are presented on screen along with videos featuring celebrated actors reading. Fun for readers of all ages!
• Sesame Street Story Book Builder. Use this tool with young children to help them create their own storybooks in the form of a choose your own adventure!
• Wordle. Wordle is a word guessing game where you have six chances to identify a five letter word. Great fun for testing vocabulary! For younger children, try Letterle where they need to guess a letter in the least number of tries.
• Calm. Does your child need some time to calm down? Check out NPR’s Joy Generator or Pixel Thoughts for a daily dose of mindfulness.
• Creative Design. Canva is a free design tool that allows users to make posters, invitations, greeting cards, social media videos, and more. Extensive collections of templates allows everyone to be a designer!
• Word Clouds. Word clouds are useful tools for analyzing a text to see the most frequently used words. They are often presented as art. Copy some text and head over to WordClouds to paste the text and create your word cloud.
• Vocabulary. Summer is an important time for children to expand their vocabulary. The Fryer Model is a simple way to help children make a new word their own. Download a template in Word or PDF format or Learn More here.
• Writing for 60 Seconds. One Word is a web site that asks users to spend 60 seconds typing as much as they can about the word. This simple technique builds writing fluency for writers of all ages.
• Digital Skills. Parents can visit Google’s Applied Digital Skills to identify lessons that provide activities for learning practical digital skills.
• Family Math. Many students believe that math is something we only do in school. Explore the Daily Routines Family Math resources to discover practical ways that parents can engage children in math problem solving.
• Make Your Own Font. Many writers and designers are interested in creating their own font to enhance the message they are expressing. FontStruct is a free font-building tool that can be used in any Macintosh or Windows applications.
• Acts of Kindness. Learning how to be kind is a life-long lesson. Explore ideas at Acts of Kindness for Kids to see how you might encourage children to express kindness.
• Interactive Science Simulations. Help your child explore their interests in math and science through a collection of visual simulations from the University of Colorado.

Teachers

Explore the following web resources to discover new tools that you can use to support diverse learners when school resumes. Enjoy!

• Find the “Best” Web Sites. Larry Ferlazzo is a ESL teacher who spends a great deal of time trying to find new web tools to help his students. Follow him on his blog and explore the results of his 2,000 “Best” Lists to locate amazing resources for your students.
• Evidence-based Interventions. Intervention Central provides teachers with numerous academic and behavioral intervention resources and tools. Ready-to-use materials are a must-have tool for every busy professional!
• Choice Boards. Choice boards are especially popular for all grade levels. Teachers populate a tic-tac-toe grid with relevant learning activities for students to select from (three in a row). Download a ChoiceBoard template here or conduct a Google search for Choice Boards to discover additional ideas.
• Privacy. Concerns about user privacy are increasing awareness about the ways in which children’s data is being collected and used by many software developers. Learn more about what you can do by reading, Top Five Questions About App Data Privacy.
• Bookmarks. Using the bookmark feature in your web browser allows you to save the link of favorite web sites. However, teachers often discover that the bookmarks they make on their school computer are not accessible from home. xBrowserSync is a free open-source browser syncing tool.
• Design Anything. Canva for Education is powerful and easy to use design platform that is 100% free for K12 teachers and their students. Canva's templates facilitate the creation of presentations, infographics, videos, and more.
• Audio and Video Feedback. Many students struggle to capture their ideas on paper. Flipgrid is a free mobile app and website to share short videos and provide audio and video responses.
• Text Complexity. Do you have students who struggle to independently read grade level texts. Text Compactor is a free web-based tool that allows users to paste text and then use a slider to make a summary of the key information. Useful for expository text but does not summarize fiction.
• App Finder. Looking for new apps for your classroom? CommonSense is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to provide digital literacy recommendations to teachers and parents.
• Make Digital Lessons. PearDeck and NearPod are easy to use tools to create instructional content with built-in formative assessments. Easily integrates with other classroom tools like Powerpoint and Google Classroom. See new levels of student engagement!
• Social Justice and Anti-racism. EmbraceRace is a valuable resource collection for anyone looking for social justice and anti-racism curricula.
• Self-Paced Learning. Educators are well aware that students do not learn at the same rate. Review this blog post, Self-Paced Lessons Set Students up for Success, to access templates and strategies for differentiating and personalizing instruction.
• Writing. Looking for new tools to add to your toolbox that engage students in writing? Storybird offers the opportunity to write short stories, books, poetry, comics, and flash fiction and illustrate the text with commercial quality art and images.
• Instructional Videos. CrashCourse is an organization devoted to the creation of high-quality instructional videos. Browse the playlists they’ve created on YouTube to find videos for your classes.
• Mindfulness. Student mental health will continue to be a priority during the new school year. Explore apps like Breathe, Think, Do with Sesame Street, Smiling Mind, or Calm to build mindfulness activities into the daily schedule.
• Graphic Organizers. Graphic organizers are powerful evidence-based strategies that can be used in both reading (as a comprehension aid) and writing (as a pre-writing support). Explore free templates at Free Graphic Organizer Templates, Canva, and Freeology.
• Virtual Science Labs. Looking for new virtual science labs to help students learn key scientific concepts? Explore the free virtual labs at PHET, 3M Young Scientist Lab, and a Virtual Lab resource collection assembled by Miguel Guhlin.
• Icons and Emojis. Looking for free icons to add to your instructional materials? Check out IconArchive with over 700,000 free icons or JoyPixels with over 3,500 emojis.
• Advanced Math. Skew the Script is a site that offers feee math lessons that transforms Algebra into relevant real-world problems to provide your students with relevant and engaging opportunities for mathematical reasoning and problem solving.
• Math Symbols. Writing equations and math expressions has always been difficult on the computer. All that has changed with Equatio, a free Chrome extension, Learn more about how to install and use Equatio.
• Google Lens. Ever wish you could look up a topic on Google but you don’t know what you are looking at? Use Google Lens to point and shoot - Search for what you see!