Science zooburst

April 23 reviews

This week I reviewed a game called Adventure Island, which was essentially teaching kids how to use map skills. I really enjoyed the game and think kids would really get into the timed exercise. It had lots of information about map symbols and also how to identify symbols using a map key, so it would be a great tool for Social Studies.

The other resource I reviewed is from studyzone.com, called "Identify the Main Idea." This was more like a little mini quiz to test comprehension of the main idea, and it gave several paragraphs to read and click the main idea for each paragraph. It would be a great activity for those students who struggle with grasping the main idea of a paragraph, to give them extra practice picking it out. I would definitely use this in my future classroom to follow a minilesson for those struggling with comprehension skills in English Language Arts and Reading.

Art Site Reviews

I wasn’t too impressed with this site. Some of the options were “unavailable” when I clicked on them, and I can use “Paint” on my desktop easier than I can use this site. I don’t like that every time you draw something a dialogue box pops up that you have to hit “ok” or “cancel.” The only thing I actually liked more than Paint was that you can change the opacity so that things can blend together and look shadowy and stuff. Other than that, this site was boring to me and more complicated and hard to work than paint, with less options.