Hi everyone! Sorry for my long absence - you know how busy teaching is! It's Thanksgiving Break now - so I have a wee little bit of time for myself! Woo-hoo! My first blog to-do: edublog nomination! This year I am nominating  

Heidisongs for Best Educational us of audio/video/ visual/ podcast. In particular - I think the videos she posts are delightful and very, very useful in understanding the message of her blog.

While on the topic, I'd like to post a review of her dvd products that I received last summer. I have been using the Sing and Spell Dvd's for sight words with each of our 5 new words every week and my kids this year are doing WAY better on learning their sight words. They love the time we spent practicing them every day and are so disappointed the days we don't get to use the music to practice. Their absolute favorite is the "his" song - the honking all the way through plus the crash at the end is hysterical to them! Then, there is the Letter and Sounds DVD that we use every day when we do phonics. I have many students who already know their alphabet and all or nearly all of the letter sounds -woo-hoo! We use Saxon Phonics, which is a letter-a-week approach - so them knowing so much more of the alphabet then what that curriculum covers is amazing! We have used the Numbers and Shapes DVD too, which was fun for them and worked just as well. I really ought to go through the Little Songs for Language Arts and the Musical Math DVD and plug the songs into my curriculum map so I remember to include them in lesson plans and use these more. One problem I have encountered is that my poor computer in my classroom has been freezing and failing on me since school started, which makes using the dvd's tough. Switching between them, especially the sight word dvd's, can be a pain too. Any suggestions for that? I love the dvd format, but it's too much to load them all on my crappy computer.
So, overall, these dvd's are a tremendous educational resource! I'll have to make a post at the end of the year with the average # of sight words learned- maybe compared to last year if I can find that data! How cool would that be?