Inspiration.

Inspiration is a powerful way for students to reach high levels of cognition performance. 

It's used as a learning and teaching technique and visually illustrates the relationships between concepts and ideas. Concepts are linked by words and phrases that explain the connection between the ideas, and helps students organize thoughts to further understand information and discover new relationships. The many benefits of using Inspiration software are:

• Helps students brainstorm and generate new ideas
• Encourages students to discover new concepts and the propositions that connect them
• Enables students to gain enhance knowledge of any topic and evaluate the information

In my future classroom, I will use Inspiration in a variety ways. My favorite way of using Inspiration is to create concept maps over stories that the class is reading or studying. The students can have fun and express their creativity. They also simultaneously learn skills that are useful in their future and are inspired to be creative. Inspiration can be used to teach numerous literary works throughout the school year, and can even be used to teach writing. Inspiration's potential in the English classroom is limitless.

An example of the way Inspiration can be used is to create a basic concept map of J.K Rowling's character Harry Potter. 

LRC eKit.

Little Puppy Rap

This LRC eKit is called Little Puppy Rap. This eKit includes three items:

• dog puppet
• hangUp Number Board
• the story "Little Puppy Rap". 

The dog puppet is a hand-held medium sized dog puppet. You are able to control the dog's mouth when using this puppet. The hangUp Number Board is a wooden number board. There are slots for the numbers 0-9, with a block number that fits into each slot. They are removable. The "Little Puppy Rap" is a large printed story by Alan Trussell-Cullen and illustrated by Astrid Matjijasevic. It is an emergent level read-together story. 

This resource could be used to explore rhyming, and counting with students in grade K. While researching, I found many usable resources that relate to this eKit. On Discovery Education, there is a song "When I was Young" that can be used in relation to the eKit story. It teachers students how to count backwards, which is a focus of the story. Another resource I found was also located on Discovery Education. It is a video called "Rhyme Time" and highlights rhyming in ways to help the students understand the general concept of rhyming.

My ideas for using these resources in instruction include:

• Reading through the story while using the hand held puppet to narrate that actions that happen in the story. This will give the students a visual and will help them follow along with the story and keep their attention.
• Reading through the story while using the number board to give the students a visual of the countdown of the numbers 1-10 that happen in the story. This will help the students follow along with where the countdown is in the story and allow them to practice the countdown of numbers. 

Both of these ideas will help the students learn by focusing on a certain aspect of the story. Both ideas focus on visual learning and the number board also focuses on mathematics in the form of counting numbers backwards from 1-10.