Incoporating Children's Books & Technology into Writing Workshop Mini Lessons

I found a great article for teachers looking for ways to motivate students in writing. After reading an article I found in The Reading Teacher, I was very happy to learn new resources I could use to help incorporate technology into the language arts curriculum. I have been constantly adding to my list of beneficial websites that I can use in my future educational career and found that this article gave me several new websites that I will surely use with my future students. The article listed several children’s books (for both early and more advanced readers) and then gave technology resources that could be used to teach specific writing skills and strategies during a writing workshop mini lesson for each book. Although I am familiar with writing workshop mini lessons I have never actually performed a writing workshop mini lesson myself. I felt that this article gave me several ideas of how I can incorporate writing and technology with reading and children’s literature. Some technology resources suggested by the article included using Inspiration to allow students to generate and organize their writing ideas before beginning a piece of writing and using the website www.rhymer.com to help students with writing poetry. The website includes a rhyming dictionary which helps students find a word that rhymes with another word. This makes it easy for students to look up words that often are difficult to rhyme with and still choose words that evoke clear images and meaning in their poetry. Another website the article suggests is http://gigglepoetry.com/. This website can be used during a poetry writing mini lesson to help motivate students to read and write poetry. The website allows students to read and perform silly poems and also complete their own silly poems by using fill-in-the-blank poetry forms. The article also suggested resources for teachers, such as browsing through lesson plans on http://www.readwritethink.org/, http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/home.jspnd, and http://www.emints.org/. The article also suggests visiting author’s websites to help students learn more about the authors of the books they are reading. I think this article does a very good job of laying out how technology can be easily integrated with language arts activities. It definitely allows reading to be more interactive, hands-on, and exciting for all different types of learners. By incorporating technology into language arts lessons, it will benefit students no whether they learn best through visual, audio, or kinesthetic materials and activities.

Check out the article for yourself!
Kara-Soteriou, J., Zawilinski, L., & Henry, L.A. (2007). Children’s books and technology in the classroom: A dynamic combo for supporting the writing workshop. The Reading Teacher. 60(7), pp.698-707.