BibMe

bibme

Where was this when we were in high school?   BibMe is a website which takes all of your sources for a paper and creates a bibliography for you.    BibMe is an automated citation creator and bibliography generator. It can save you loads of time building and formatting your references, time that is understandably valuable and would be better served working on your paper.

BibMe allows you to search for books, websites, films, magazines, journals and newspapers from a database of millions of entries to find your source and autofill in the information. BibMe also allows manual entry where you enter all the necessary information yourself instead of choosing from BibMe.




BibMe offers resources to help you cite your work properly in the “Citation Guide” section. You can find information on the different formats for references your sources, using MLA, APA, and Chicago.



To create a bibliography, you’ll need to register for the service, you can save up to 10 bibliographies to your account for future use. Once you have saved a bibliography to your account, you can open it up at a later time to edit by clicking “Open”. The bibliography you open will replace your current bibliography in the “My Bibliography” pane. Or if you would like, you can permanently delete a bibliography by clicking “Delete.” You can also download your bibliography in either the MLA, APA, or Chicago formats and include it in your paper.

BibMe is a great service for free, visit http://bibme.org/ and try it for yourself.

Interactives. Elements of a Story

Interactives - Elements of a Story uses the story of Cinderella as a model for learning about the elements of a story. To use this interactive students select any element of the story; setting, character, sequence, exposition, conflict, climax, or resolution then read and listen to an explanation of that element of the story. After they have worked through all of the elements of the story, they can take a quiz to test their knowledge.

Despite the fact that it uses a fairy tale, Cinderella, this is a resource that is accessible to elementary school, middle school, and high school students. Although the graphics are clearly aimed toward elementary school students, this could certainly be a review resource for older students.

NaNoWriMo Young Writer's Program

My friend told me about the NaNoWriMo Young Writer's Program.  We are using it as our writing program for this semester.    NaNoWriMo offers amazing workbooks to prepare students for November.   They offered for free and are written for elementary, middle school and high school students.  
 

National Novel Writing Month happens every November! It's a fun, seat-of-your-pants writing event where the challenge is to complete an entire novel in just 30 days. For one month, you get to lock away your inner editor, let your imagination take over, and just create!  That means participants begin writing November 1 and must finish by midnight, November 30.   The Young Writers Program (YWP) allows 17-and-under participants to set reasonable, yet challenging, individual word-count goals. 


Some of the skills NaNoWriMo builds:

• Fluency: Writing so much in so little time boosts students’ proficiency in grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and will help them approach future writing assignments with ease and confidence.
• Confidence: When creating so much text in such a short period of time, students realize just how much they can accomplish when they put their minds to it. NaNoWriMo leaves young writers asking themselves, “What’s next?”
• Creativity: Creating characters, situations, dialogue, and even whole planets from scratch helps kids think, but it also teaches them how to apply their fanciful ideas to a full project.
• Time Management: Our curriculum teaches students how to tackle a huge project by breaking it down into manageable bites!