Need of Reading Ideas?

I am in the process of collecting ideas for my final project. I am interested in finding a link between technology and how it effects oral reading fluency. Presently in my classroom I am using Tumble Books. While doing my literature reveiw I ran across an article about a  librain who used Tumblebooks for Intervention classes. She saw a vast improvement in the oral reading fluency skills with students who used the website TumbleBooks verses the students who did not. I found this study very interesting. If you use any really good reading websites, I would be interested in hearing about them. Also in my classroom, my students use Study Island. I am interested even in apps for the ipod touch (ipad) and app for the Kindle Fire. I look forward in hearing from you.

For this blog I wanted to see what my fellow teachers think about our law makers adding 5 days to the school calendar. Personally, I can't believe they are asking this of us. I not sure what they are trying to accomplish by making the students go five extra days of school. From what I understand the school system has to foot the bill to run the schools on those five days. Do you know how much money that is? That includes lights, buses, gas, afterschool care, lunch, etc. That is a ton of money. The problem with that is that teachers have not had a raise in four years. That is FOUR YEARS!!!!!!!!! I would rather them take the money from the 5 days and give me a raise. I'm not trying to take anything away from the students, but law makers are just putting more and more on the teachers and we don't even get a pat on the back. I'm not really sure what five day is going to do for the students. Looking at our proposed calendar, we only have one workday for the entire school year. One day!!!!!! What would help me to be a more effective teacher is have more workdays in my classroom instead of meetings, meetings, meetings. I just wanedt to know what my fellow teachers think about the 5 extra days of school. Please let me know.

What's Going On In Second Grade

There are a lot of things going on in second grade right now. Just recently our class studied weather. I found some really cool songs on the internet that had to do with weather. One was Bill Nye the Science Guy and "Whether the Weather". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq-muLRSuAw If you teach weather you need to go and check it out. It is a really cool rap that my kids loved to sing along to. It's on the different types of climates around the word. Then I added two video clips from Bill Nye on wind and the atmosphere.
This is a Video Clip on Wind - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBqohRu2RRk&feature=related
This is a video clip on the atmosphere - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGNxYtT_36I&feature=related

Then I googled weather songs and one called Mrs. Jones weather song popped up. It goes to the tune of "BINGO" and uses different types of weather words. This is the link -
http://www.mrsjonesroom.com/songs/weather.html  My kids begged to sing this song daily.

Everyday for 2 weeks my students recorded the 7-day forecast from http://www.digtriad.com/
at the beginning of the week. Then we would watch Ed Matthews weather video daily to see how close the weatherman's predictions for the week. I have to say that the weatherman did a great job at predicting the weather. My students learned a lot from these few video clips. I thought I would share.

My First Blog - WooHoo!

This is the first time I have ever attempted to create a blog on the internet. I have to say, so far so good. I can't believe that I actually did it. I guess I am up and running. When it comes to technology I'm not the brightest bulb in the box. For all you bloggers out there, do you have any suggestions for me on how to blog? I am open for any suggestions. I look forward to hearing from you:)