This Week on ReadWriteThink, for August 1 to 11

August is a hopping month on ReadWriteThink. With teachers getting ready to head back to the classroom, the calendar is jam-packed with resources to help make the first days full of fun learning.

You can find back-to-school booklists, icebreaker activities, and community-building resources on our back to school calendar entry. In the featured classroom activity, students share details about their lives with one another using the interactive Graphic Map and share their memories in small groups or with the whole class.

If you’re looking for STEM activities, it’s a good time to talk about computers and the prototype for the World Wide Web, which was created in August 1990. Budding astronauts can explore the first satellite picture of Earth, taken in 1959.

This week’s featured birthdays focus on President Barack Obama (August 4), French author Guy de Maupassant (August 5), science writer Seymour Simon (August 9), and writer Alex Haley (August 11). In sports history, the first woman swam the English Channel (August 6).

This week also marks the anniversary of our national museum. The Smithsonian Institution was founded August 10, 1846. Today, it has expanded to a network of 16 museums and 129 affiliate museums–including the National Zoo and the National Air and Space Museum. Celebrate by exploring an exhibit online and writing “A Day in the Life” narratives that tell about a person, animal, or object they saw in the exhibit.

In addition to those timely topics, check out these new resources for more ideas for the classroom:

• Podcast: Barnyard Antics, Episode 57 of Chatting About Books: Recommendations for Young Readers (for grades K–5)
• Mobile App: Venn Diagram for iOS and Android (for grades K–12)
• Lesson Plan: Using Tiered Companion Texts to Comprehend Complex Nonfiction Texts (for grades 3–5)
• New Strategy Guide on using mobile devices: Reading on the Go (for teachers of grades 5–12)

[Photo: 244.365 – September 1, 2010 by meddygarnet, on Flickr]