Resources
General Search Engines
The general search engines that I used were Yahoo, Altovista and Lycos. I was more familiar with Yahoo because I use it at home. It has a directory, a categorized guide, image, audio and a video search. Altovista also contained the image, audio, video searches and it could translate your search into several languages. The Lycos website was just too busy looking to me. It was very crowded and too many items on the home page. They had blogs, careers, games, horoscopes, classifieds and advertising besides the regular features. The Altovista website had the advanced search where you could type exact word phrases or omit words from your search phrase.
My first search was with the general phrase “coin recognition”. It gave me thousands of hits on all websites. So I added the phrase “for grades k-1’. The hits were reduced to the hundreds. When I added “worksheets” to the phrase, Lycos was the only one that brought the hits fewer than 100.
www.mrspohlmeyerskinderpage.com
Target audience: Kindergarten
Content area: Math
Type: Elementary Education K-1
Topic: Coin Recognition
Description: This was a personal website from a teacher and she described what she teaches in
kindergarten regarding the lessons. She had lessons using money, numbers, alphabet etc…It was very
informative and I’ll visit her site again. It was very easy to navigate.
Target audience: Kindergarten
Content area: Math
Type: Elementary Education K-1
Topic: Coin recognition
Description: This was a good website. It gave worksheets about money. Each coin had a separate
worksheet. It also had worksheets that combined the coins. It was very easy to navigate through the web.
Target audience: Kindergarten
Content area: Language Arts
Type: Elementary Education K-1
Topic and Key Word: Word Families
Description: This is a great website and many teachers use it. It has every category you can think of in
a lesson plan. I looked up word families because I noticed children today are having difficulty with rhyming words.
Doesn’t anyone read the Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes? [Top]
Multithreaded Search Engines
The multithreaded search engine I used was Ixquick. Adding more words to my search narrowed the hits down. It didn’t have an advanced search, but it could translate into different languages. The results listed the various search engines the website is found in.
Target audience: Kindergarten
Content area: Math, Language Arts
Type: Elementary Education K-3
Topic: Counting money, letters
Description: This is also a good site in spite of having many dead links. When you get to the site type in the
key words "coin recognition" in the search box and then look for the web site that has "Kevin Henkes author study."
When you open the site it should have " Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse." It also includes informal lesson plans that refer to
books. For counting money and letters they use books by Kevin Henkes. I found a cute project to do for the book
titled “Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse." It had two worksheets about money that I could use. Although this site did not score high
with the SET I recorded (see SET on this page), I would still visit it. [Top]
Categorical Search Engines
The categorical search site I used was called Search Engine and it had the advanced search where I could type in an exact phrase or omit certain words in the search. Key word was "Songs for Kindergarten." This site also listed the various search engines the website will be found in. Categorical search engines are supposed to have the most current information.
Target audience: Kindergarten
Content area: Music
Type: Elementary Education K-1
Topic: Songs
Description: This was an informative website. It had lesson plans, thematic units, songs, and book activities.
It was very easy to navigate. It had the words to many songs that could be used in class.
@2006 Annie Spencer
Site Evaluation Tool (SET)
Before you recommend websites to your students or their parents, it is important to do an evaluation of the website. You don't want to send them to an inefficient, hard to navigate, or has lots of dead links website. It is important to critique the site on General Aspects, Design of Website and Pedagogy (teaching methods).
I evaluated the website www.teachingheart.net. It is a website for K-3 and covers curriculum Math and Language Arts. To see my evaluation and comments click here on the word SET.