Scholastic Books Website: Online Activities and Interactive Learning

The Online and Interactive Activities section of the Scholastic Books website holds many resources for online workshops and activties for students when they are in centers. Across the top of the page there are tabs indicating grade level ranges.  After you click on a grade level the page will change to activties appropriate for that grade level.  I will be using the 3-5 section as my example for this post. As you scroll down the grades 3-4 tabbed page you will see on the left a long list of langauge arts activities and links.  At the end you will also see the Writing and Publishing section.

I particularly like the workshops section which includes many different topics such as biography, news reporting, poetry, speech writing and many more.  These are really neat because they step the student through the writing process to create whatever genre of writing they are composing.  Here is a link to the writing workshop on biographies. It first gives the student a short piece of biographical writing to help them get a feel for the genre, then it steps them through brainstorming, writing and publishing.  Pretty cool for an online resource!  The kids could totally do this on their own.  This is only one of the many helpful things on this website. 

I will definitely use this in my classroom for some independent writing instruction for students who might need some step by step instructions after I have taught about genres or any other writing topic.