Blog Journal #4

 For the discussion regarding ELA, I have chosen a standard from the first grade set of standards. The one that I chose was to make sure my students learn how to properly use text features like headings, table of contents, glossaries, electronic menus, and icons so that they can locate specific information and facts. I do feel that this is a necessary skill to teach because of how technologically advanced our society has become. I think I would feel comfortable teaching this because I am very familiar with it and it is not a very hard skill to pass on to them.

Obviously, in order to meet these standards, as teachers we must use resources we can find and are provided to help the kids reach this goals. I chose a fun game called 'Cool Context Clues' which is an interactive video/game where kids learn about how to use context clues to figure out what a word in a sentence means that they don't know. It uses lots of fun pictures and first explains the skill with an example and then gives them a sentence with a foreign word with three pictures that they have to pick from that matches the sentence. They have to use the context clues from the picture to figure out the word's meaning. I would use this one because I feel it would best capture a first grader's attention because of the cute and fun cartoons and they have to interact, which will test if they are actually learning it.

When talking in depth about internet searching, I realised that there are a lot more efficient ways to find what I am looking for. Often times I struggle trying to look for something specific that I am searching up, and one skill we discussed that I really think will be useful is putting quotations around what I can looking for. Using this makes the search engine only pull up results that include the words I've typed. This will eliminate anything else that is similar to what I am looking up, but not exactly what I want. It will also be a huge time saver.