Good Afternoon Howe Families!

Today, I wanted to tell you about a wonderful tool offered by Scholastic called Character Scrapbook.

This interactive tool will help students identify and analyze different types of character traits for characters in both fiction and nonfiction books. When you are complete, you can print off and collect your scrapbook pages!

This is a great after-reading resource 🙂

Stay safe and healthy!

Best,
Ms. Puchal

Good Morning!

I hope that everyone is doing well!

I am here with an extension activity from Scholastic Interactive Learning and Reading.

Community Club provides reading activities for early readers. There are 15 nonfiction read-along books. Listen and Read activities tell their stories through words, images, and sound. The topics range from community to animals.

Enjoy this resource! Let me know what you think 🙂

Stay safe and healthy!

Best,
Ms. Puchala

Scholastic is providing at-home learning over the summer months with Scholastic Summer Read-a-Palooza.

When: Monday, May 4th – Friday, September 4th

This is a free program that celebrates reading for fun while improving access to books during the summer.

Scholastic Summer Read-a-Palooza will provide you with the information you need about the program.

Scholastic Home Base Information

How to login to Home Base

Enjoy the beautiful weather this weekend 🙂

Stay safe and healthy!

Best,
Ms. Puchala

Good Evening Howe Family!

I hope everyone is well!

I wanted to share with you two interactive activities for our Early Readers. Both these activities are from Scholastics and provide our young ones practice of short vowel sounds.

Make a Word: A Clifford Interactive Storybook

With this activity, students create words by dragging missing vowels to them. Once they have created a word, a narrator sounds out the word, helping students practice identifying words with short-vowel sounds and sound spellings.

Learning Objectives

While participating in Make a Word, students will:

• Develop phonemic awareness skills
• Distinguish easily confused letter pairs
• Recognize common short and long vowel sound spellings
• Interact with the computer to create new text

Here, Clifford!: An Interactive Storybook

With this activity, students choose a word (from three options) to complete a sentence and then listen to the page read aloud with the new sentence. The illustration also changes to reflect the new word and sentence.

Sample page:

Clifford runs to the beach.
“Here, Clifford. I see you.
I see you behind the ______. “
Students choose from: fence, net, tent

Learning Objectives

While participating in the “Here, Clifford!” activity, students will:

• Develop phonemic awareness skills
• Read stories containing high-frequency words
• Interact with the computer to create new text
• Understand that changing one word in a sentence can change the meaning of the entire sentence

I hope that you and your families enjoy these resources! Let me know what you think of them 🙂

Stay safe and healthy!

Best,
Ms. Puchala

Good Afternoon!

I hope that everyone is well and has gotten the opportunity to get outside and enjoy the fresh air!

I want to share a resource with you today that will allow your children to use their imaginations and be creative.

Story Starters is a creative writing activity provided through Scholastic. Students start by choosing the type of story they want to write: adventure, fantasy, sci-fi, or scramble. The program then guides them through the next steps. The program asks for the student’s name and grade level. Next, it instructs them to spin a wheel to get the story starter. Each screen from there offers different instructions that will keep your child engaged and actively participating. When they complete their story, there is even an option to print it. This program is interactive and never the same twice.

Have a great evening!

Best,
Ms. Puchala

I have listed below some websites that will help develop our students’ love of reading.

Storyline Online
Developed by The Screen Actors Guild Foundation, Storyline Online features accomplished actors and actresses reading some of their favorite children’s books.  Each story comes with a free Activity Guide and can be viewed on YouTube or SchoolTube.  Rainbow Fish, Wilfrid Gordon Macdonald Partridge, and To Be a Drum are just a few of the books available.

International Children’s Digital Library
Discover books from around the world at the International Children’s Digital Library.  The free site does not read the books aloud, but students can read them independently during Read to Self or free time.  This is a great site for extension activities when learning about different regions of the world and can be used effectively into the middle school grades.

Story Place
At Story Place, you’ll find entertaining stories and early literacy activities, in formats compatible with desktop computers and with different mobile devices. As soon as you enter, you will see eye-catching colors and characters that your children will love.

Free Kids Books
This great portal with books sorted by categories for children of different ages. What is wonderful, is that you have the options to read online or download the books in PDF format for free for your child to read as many times as you want without an Internet connection.