Report Card Comments

As I was writing my reports today I came across this pretty neat site. http://www.lessonplansforfree.com/default.aspx provides examples of report card comments for Art, Language Arts, Science and Social Studies for the elementary grades.  All you have to do is select the subject, the grade level and the grade (A-D) and the site gives you examples of things to write.  You can even type in the students name in a box above and your students name will appear in the comment so that you can just copy and paste!  It was just the help I needed to get my comments sound a little bit better and not so repetitive. 

Cookie

Wow!  Cookie is a new website I recently came across.  It is a goldmine for teachers (and parents) of young kids between the ages of 3 and 8.  It has online games, short animated videos, worksheets and stories.
They are all organized into different categories like language, math, science, puzzles and many more.
For a teacher it's a great place to quickly find a game or worksheet for students to work on a specific skill being taught.  Children can work on sequencing activities, phonics and alphabet activities, counting and math activities, personal hygiene, months of the year... a very wide array of themes.  It's worth a look!
The games are great worked on a computer alone but are also great played on a smartboard.
http://www.cookie.com/

Movie Poster Maker

Here is a really cool and easy to use site to create your very own movie posters.  There is an easy to use form that you fill in with your title, tags and even a space for the credits.  You can also upload your own picture and then a realistic movie poster is created in minutes.  The file can then be saved and you can print or even order the movie poster.  A really cool thing about this site is that if you use your own picture you can even get a hi-resolution version that you can use to print out from any retailer.  They don't force you to order from them. I was able to explore the movie poster section but with a quick glance at the rest of the bighugelabs.com site it seems that there are a bunch of cool things to do with your digital pictures like turn your pics into puzzles, magazine covers, pop art.  Lots of fun for teachers with a ton of educational possibilities!
http://bighugelabs.com/poster.php

KinderArt

I love art but I sometimes find myself struggling to find ideas for original art projects every week.  This site is a wonderful resource to help!  It is a site with thousands of art ideas all categorized by type of art (ex. sculpture, drawing, painting, etc.), theme (ex. folk art, multicultural art, holidays, etc.) or by grade.  This site also has colouring pages with their original art, patterns for different art projects, blank calendar pages, etc.  It also has a store where you can purchase books, art supplies or bundles of already made colouring pages but most things on this site are free.  There are enough ideas on this site to last many years!!!

http://www.kinderart.com/index.html