Well.......what a week it has been. I was really excited to try a site new to me called Trailfire. This is a site where you can tag a website and place an online sticky note on the page. The goal is to make a "trail" of sticky notes for the user to follow. Each sticky note leads to another and another and so on. As a teacher, I can place questions or comments on each sticky note indicating to the student what I want them to do or learn at each site. GREAT IDEA to whoever thought of this!
I decided to make my trail an alphabet trail for my kindergarten students. I chose this standard for several reasons. One, learning letters and sounds is the foundation to almost all reading skills in kindergarten. We are continuously working on the alphabet in some form or fashion all year long. Second, I thought choosing sites to learn about the alphabet would be a great home activity for parents to review with their children. Some parents did not grow up learning to read with sounds. These websites are good for those parents who are unsure of how to help their child with phonetic skills. Third, my students cannot yet read. I wanted to set up a trail that would be interactive and fun and still reinforce Tennessee state standards.
I found some wonderful sites that cover various alphabet skills, such as, listening to letters and sounds, matching capital and lowercase, sorting beginning sounds, ABC order, and watching a video that has sign language for each letter.
Here is the downfall. I so eagerly go to school to try out my alphabet trail on my students. I have the trail set up so that an adult guides the students through it. When I try to pull it up on the school internet, it is BLOCKED! The positive side is parents can still do it at home. This is especially good for those parents who really want to help at home but do not know where to begin.
Setting up the trail itself was a relatively smooth process after I got the hang of the icons and learned how to edit. The most difficult part for me was that it was time consuming. It just took trial and error, marking sites then trying the trail out to see if it worked.
Hopefully, all my marks are working. If you get to a site and do not see the sticky note, look for a little 'h'. Put your cursor over the 'h' and the sticky note might pop up.
If you are interested in trying out my alphabet trail, it is so much fun. It is interactive and great for young children. Click here for an ABC adventure!
I decided to make my trail an alphabet trail for my kindergarten students. I chose this standard for several reasons. One, learning letters and sounds is the foundation to almost all reading skills in kindergarten. We are continuously working on the alphabet in some form or fashion all year long. Second, I thought choosing sites to learn about the alphabet would be a great home activity for parents to review with their children. Some parents did not grow up learning to read with sounds. These websites are good for those parents who are unsure of how to help their child with phonetic skills. Third, my students cannot yet read. I wanted to set up a trail that would be interactive and fun and still reinforce Tennessee state standards.
I found some wonderful sites that cover various alphabet skills, such as, listening to letters and sounds, matching capital and lowercase, sorting beginning sounds, ABC order, and watching a video that has sign language for each letter.
Here is the downfall. I so eagerly go to school to try out my alphabet trail on my students. I have the trail set up so that an adult guides the students through it. When I try to pull it up on the school internet, it is BLOCKED! The positive side is parents can still do it at home. This is especially good for those parents who really want to help at home but do not know where to begin.
Setting up the trail itself was a relatively smooth process after I got the hang of the icons and learned how to edit. The most difficult part for me was that it was time consuming. It just took trial and error, marking sites then trying the trail out to see if it worked.
Hopefully, all my marks are working. If you get to a site and do not see the sticky note, look for a little 'h'. Put your cursor over the 'h' and the sticky note might pop up.
If you are interested in trying out my alphabet trail, it is so much fun. It is interactive and great for young children. Click here for an ABC adventure!
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