HeidiSongs Teaching Resource

Recently, on my Facebook page I asked for math and reading website recommendations for Preschool and Kindergarten aged children. I received so many great suggestions that I wanted to share them with you here. 1.  Starfall Starfall i s a site to help kids learn language arts skills both at home and school. With four different areas of study, this site is great for moving children from basic letter recognition to reading comprehension. Starfall offers packages for families and classrooms and each package includes online and printable materials.  Just about every educator I know has heard of Starfall!  As for me, I never really got "into" using it.  Sorry, but the bitmapped images really bug me!  There is a free site and a paid membership site that starts at $30 for home use and $70 per year for a teacher with six students.   (Who has only six students? )  It's $150 per year for a teacher with the entire classroom signe...

A while back, I asked some Facebook friends if they knew of some websites where I could find storybooks read aloud to children online, and I got a whole bunch of suggestions!  Since then, I have found it incredibly helpful to be able to put a story on our big screen and let the whole class watch it while I get materials out for a lesson, or put materials away, or even test a few children individually!  I think that this might be a great thing for parents to do to keep their little ones happy at the end of the summer, too! While the overwhelming favorite website suggested was tumblebooks.com , that one does require a paid subscription, so I haven’t taken the plunge on purchasing it.  (But more on that below!)  My favorite website for this purpose so far is pbskids.org/lions/stories .  Below here are a few more sites that I was given.  Please note that I haven’t tried them all out yet.   A few of them proved to take too long to load their books up...

I love using iPads and iPods in my classroom, but keeping kids on the app that I have designated for the day has been almost impossible without an adult to keep an eye on them- until I learned about a wonderful feature called GUIDED ACCESS .  A participant at the Catholic Ministries Conference in Dallas told me about Guided Access in October, and since then I was eager to try it out so that I could tell you all about it.  She said that all I had to do to use Guided Access on my iPad or iPod Touch was to make sure I had fully updated the operating system to version iOS 6.0 or later.  All I had to do was download it and that it would probably take about an hour. My heart sank, because the way she described it sounded terribly confusing to me and “techy.”  If it was that hard, how would I manage it with six iPads in the room?  And furthermore, how in the world would I be able to explain it to all of you?  As far as I was concerned, it was a deal breake...

Do you teach Holidays Around the World?  Here is an EASY way to teach it, and combined with the wonderful tool of Google Earth, your kids will LOVE it!  My kids really did!  There’s no prep, and you won’t need to go to the library or book store to try to find ten different books on ten different holiday traditions.  (Those books are almost ALWAYS way too long for the children to sit through anyway!)  Sound good?  Keep reading! Many years ago when I was a brand new teacher, one of the teachers I worked with gave a folder with some Christmas Around the World coloring pages.  There was one coloring sheet for each of six or seven different countries, and they featured a Christmas holiday tradition on each one.  She told me that one of the teachers at our school had drawn these pictures for the children to color, and that what I was supposed to do was to talk to the children about each country’s holiday traditions and show them the pi...

Do you have an iPad in your classroom?  Are you wondering how you can make use of it when there is only one device for all of your students to share?  Well, never fear, I have tons of ideas for you right here, and a "Rules for the iPad" free download, too!  And for those of you that may be new to my blog, this post focuses on using the iPad in the young children's classroom, such as Pre-K, Kindergarten, First Grade, etc. Before you get started using the iPad in any manner, make your expectations on how to use the device clear.  Here are my rules for the iPad. Rules for the iPad: Carry the iPad with two hands. Sit down while using the iPad. Hold the iPad from the base, not the cover. No banging, slamming, or hitting the iPad. Share nicely and stop when your turn is over. I made a poster for the rules with picture cues to help the children, and I am sharing it with you here today!  Click here to download it in two sizes; one is 8.5 x 11″ and the o...