Using the Internet Daily in Class

Many primary teachers wonder how they can use the Internet successfully in their K-2 classrooms. I would like to share a few ways that I use the Internet to enhance the daily curriculum in my second grade classroom.

Most primary classroom begin their day with calendar activities. In our class, students track and graph days of the week, days of the school year, birthdays, lost teeth, and weather. The Student of the Week checks and reports the daily temperature using an indoor/outdoor thermometer; the sky conditions; and any precipitation by observation. Then we access The Weather Underground Web site to check the "official" local weather.

We begin the school year simply by reading each day's weather forecast and seeing if it is accurate as the day goes on. I gradually add more weather information to the calendar activity as the year goes on. By February, we are checking such things as sunrise and sunset times, wind speed and direction, moon phases, and if there is a wind chill (very important during Wisconsin winters!). Once or twice per week, we look at the national maps so that we can check out radar, temperature, wind chill, wind, and other kinds of interesting weather information.

Another daily Internet activity we do is Annie's Rhyme Time. I use it as a warm-up for our daily spelling lessons. Each day, a new riddle is posted for students to solve. The answer is always two words that rhyme and have the same number of syllables.

The riddles are categorized as Easy, Medium and Hard, so you can choose one that fits the abilities of your class. We read the riddle together, then small groups of students take a few minutes to solve it together. Annie's Rhyme Time has been a great place to discuss vocabulary (What is a chap?); words that rhyme and have the same spelling pattern (rude and dude); and words that rhyme but do not have the same spelling pattern (loud and crowd). Students who have unique answers to the riddles are even invited to send their riddle answers to Annie. My students look forward to this activity each day � it is a good way to strengthen language skills and have fun at the same time!

The Weather Underground
http://www.wunderground.com

Annie's Rhyme Time
http://teacher.scholastic
.com/annie/index.asp