Storybook

Storybook is a great website with games, word banks and videos about a collection of stories written by authors Scoular Anderson, Debi Gliori, Mairi Hedderwick and Frank Rodgers. It would be a prerequisite to have the books of course and the books in question are Never Keep a Python as a Pet, Katie Morag and the New Pier, My Little Brother, I Can’t go to Sleep, The Bunk-Bed Bus, Backseat’s Special Day, Oh No Peedie Peebles and The Snow Lambs. Teachers of the younger classes my well be familiar with some of these and hopefully have them in their libarary. If so the website is for you.

The sie has interactive activities for each of the stories including bright, fun games and choosing the correct letter to complete words from the story. There are also videos of the authors talking about their story and reading excerpts. If you have these stories I highly reccomend using this website. It is suitable for children from Junior Infants to possibly 2nd class at a push.

Safety in the Home

This is a great interactive website about safety in the home, probably geared more at the younger classes. It’s bright, colourful and has some great sound effects. The website can be directly applied to the ‘Safety and Protection’ strand of the SPHE curriculum. It goes through safety in all areas of the home – kitchen, living room, the bedroom and the garden. It also shows children what to do in the event of a fire in the house. It’s a great opportunity to make your SPHE lessons come alive on the whiteboard, because I know from personal experience there are not too many chances to do so.

The Hat

The Hat is a really useful free piece of software that can be downloaded and used in any classroom. It is a very basic programme which performs a draw as if you had put a bunch of names into a hat and selected at random. The children find that it is the fairest and most fun way of picking people for jobs, presenting projects, getting free newspapers, etc. Not only can you draw out a name at a time but you can also draw out pairs of names. I have used this when doing projects in pairs and I’m sure I will find many more uses for it.

Another area where this comes in handy is for playing games like Bingo in Irish. For example we were doing the counties of Ireland last week and I quickly entered the names into the hat and picked the counties using the software. It plays a great drumroll before displaying each name and the children really enjoy it and they won’t complain about it being unfair.

Writing Fun by Jenny Eather

Writing Fun is a website set up by Jenny Eather which helps students with writing composition. The website provides instructions, tips, organisers and examples of a variety of writing composition such as narrative, discussion, explanation, persuasion, information, and others. Also included in the site are the skills necessary to compose everyday text forms such as letters, invitations, and email. Each type has at least 6 examples, for different age groups, with an interactive organiser which can be switched on or off. All of the organizers are available in Microsoft Word format for download to use for word processing or as a printable. This is a great site for students to use as homework help for those writing assignments and could also be used by parents who home school their children.