Lit Coach Lou

            Greetings From Maine

Let me first of all introduce myself as this is my very first post! I am a literacy specialist and hence the moniker - Lit Coach Lou! I taught kindergarten for 22 years and I have been a literacy specialist/coach for the past six years - all in the great state of Maine.

I hope to share my love of reading, love of teaching, love of mentoring teachers and love of books, here on my blog. I am always finding lots of great ideas from my wonderful friends and colleagues and I love to share with others. I also hope it might help me keep myself organized in one place frankly! 

Here's my first idea to share with you all. I was at an iPad training today with a rep from Apple. He told us about Project Gutenberg - www.gutenberg.org. "Project Gutenberg offers over 40,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online". 

                                                        

Although many of these books are for adult or older readers and not the latest or greatest, you can go to the search and find just the "children's shelves". I can see a variety of ways to use these stories besides the obvious. There are many different voices reading these stories and with so much emphasis being placed on fluency these days, it would be great fun to listen to the various recordings and discuss fluency. I happen to love the English accents! These recordings would also be great for teaching visualization. Many children are familiar with The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. But how many know the other stories in the series? Or even know there are other stories and it is a series?? It would be great fun to listen to one of the stories and teach visualize while you are at it!