Freerice.com is a great way to increase your vocabulary and make a difference. It’s a simple concept. When you log on to the site you are given a vocabulary word with four choices. Choose the correct answer and you just helped feed a hungry person through the United Nations World Food Program. Checkout the site for more details and while you are there it wouldn’t hurt to see if you can get your vocabulary level up a few notches and feed the hungry at the same time.

Update: Freepoverty.com is very similar to freerice.com but instead of donating rice by taking vocabulary quizzes you donate water by answering geography questions in a fun interactive quiz. Check it out and see if you can beat my score of 234!

Reading and Language Arts resources.

I would like to share two excellent resources for reading and language arts in todays tech tips. The first is Reading Rockets (click to go there). From their website: “Reading Rockets is a national multimedia project offering information and resources on how young kids learn to read, why so many struggle, and how caring adults can help.” This excellent site has tons of great tools that can help with reading instruction; parent tip sheets, multimedia resources in audio and video format, and much more. The second site is readwritethink.org. The link will take you to the interactive tools section of their website. These sites allow students to use engaging, challenging, and fun tools to develop literacy skills. A great example is the persuasion map tool. This helps students to visualize their persuasive writing before starting their paragraph. It is a great mapping tool.