PBS Teachers in the First Grade Classroom

PBS Teachers is a great resource for teachers to use in and out of the classroom. This site is an appropriate, reliable

and easy to use option for classroom teachers. It provides countless resources to use with students including lesson plans, videos and interactive games.

The very top of the PBS Teachers homepage provides a breakdown of grade levels (PreK, K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12) in order to help narrow the search of resources that will be most helpful to your specific grade level needs. By grade, the site further divides your search by subject. The subjects included are:

- The Arts
- Health and Fitness
- Math

- Reading & Language Arts
- Science & Technology
- Social Studies

Clicking on any one of these subject areas will bring you to a wealth of great resources that can be used in your classroom. To get even more specific within your grade and subject area, you can even select to filter these search results by topic.

Not only does PBS teachers provide teachers with great classroom resources, but it also provides opportunities to talk to other teachers and and continue learning through professional development opportunities.

PBS Teachers homepage includes:

Featured Classroom Resources
This section on the homepage provides teachers with top stories and resources that may be helpful. This includes videos, lesson ideas and helpful articles.

Teacher Discussions
PBS teachers allows members of the sites to post on specific topics (almost like a small blog entry) that can be viewed and shared with members of the sites. Members can post back and forth on the discussion posts in order to keep up on certain concepts or ideas for the classroom. This is a great and easy way to allow teachers to collaborate and communicate ideas with each other.

Professional Development
PBS teachers provides great opportunities for professional development. These are continuing education courses on specific subjects, strategies and technologies that help teachers to stay current and updated on their information.

In addition to these great resources, the homepage also offers PBS kids in the classroom (which provides information on education PBS shows for kids that may be used in the classroom), PBS teacher blogs, Webinar Archive, PBS News and Activity Packs.

In the first grade classroom...
One way that I will use PBS Teachers in my first grade classroom is for planning instruction related to my social studies unit on Citizenship. This site makes it easy by allowing me to select K-2 social studies and specifying the topic Civics:
Community and Citizenship. I was able to find many resources that will prove

extremely helpful. It is easy to mark and save the most useful resources by clicking on "Save Resource." This makes it extremely convenient and easy to come back to in the future. I will be able to use Neighborhood Helpers when talking to my students about important jobs in our community. My students can also use this activity to build a neighborhood in order to practice identifying the main components of a functioning community. This will be a fun way for my students to use technology when practicing the required social studies content.

PBS Teachers is a great resource that makes it easy for teachers to collaborate and find fun activities to use in the classroom.