Kid's Lit Websites

One of the sites I found and really enjoyed is the site for Chris Van Ahllsburg. http://www.chrisvanallsburg.com/home.html

I love Chris Van Allsburg’s books. They are wonderfully written and beautifully illustrated. They also have great morals and themes that make them wonderful books for classroom discussion. One of my favorite books of his is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. This book lends itself to creative writing and there is a place on the website where students can actually submit the stories they have written to Van Allsburg.

Another site I found was Roald Dahl’s website. http://www.roalddahl.com/

It is very fun and interactive and I use it with my third graders because we do an author study of Dahl. They just enjoy getting to explore the site and all the interactive features. 

http://www.scholastic.com/home/

Scholastic has fantastic teaching resources available, many for free. Printables, daily starters, book clubs and videos are just a few of the things teachers have access to.

http://www.goodreads.com/

This site is not specifically for children’s literature. It is a book social networking website. I would show my kids how to use it and allow them to peruse it themselves. You put in and rate books that you have read and the site recommends books to you based on the reading you have done. This would be fantastic for reluctant readers to help them find appropriate and interesting books to read.

http://www.childrensliteraturenetwork.org/

This site has video book trailers that give a book talk to get kids excited about reading. It also has video interviews with authors and illustrators to get kids excited about writing!

Poetry Websites

http://www.seussville.com/

http://sciencepoems.net/

http://www.scholastic.com/browse/search/teacher?query=poetry&as_values_054=&channelOnly=true

I have always been able to find a plethora of astronomy resources online. It just seems to be a topic that enough people are interested in and post cool websites and books and information. When I was specifically searching for this assignment the first website I came across was http://www.kidsastronomy.com/. This website is targeted at children and it appears to be very user-friendly because of that. I think that my third graders could easily navigate this site. The purpose of this website is educational: to be a free resource to teach kids about astronomy. It was created by the Kids Know It network, and they have websites about lots of different topics for kids to learn from.  Kidsastronomy.com is strictly facts based: there are not opinions or biases. The information is aimed at younger students, so I’m sure that more in depth information is absent purposefully. I tested several of the links on this website and they all were still working properly, and there were no spelling or grammar errors that I saw. The copyright date on the page is 1998-2013. This is an astronomy site and a few of the topics covered on it include the planets, black holes, distances in space, constellations, and space shuttles. There are also astronomy games, free lessons, and videos available.  I am very excited that I found this website and I will definitely be incorporating some of it’s content into my integrated unit.