Top Tips

The sites? eHow/ WeHow/ wikiHOw.

Legal Issues

Unfortunately, due to legal issues, these sites cannot accept article postings from students who are under the age of 18. Fortunately, there is a lot that teachers can still do to use the resources of these sites for instruction.

Registration on the site is required for anyone that wishes to post either an article, or a comment about an article. Registration is not needed to read the "How-to" articles.

What do these Sites Offer

Do you want your students to read and write how-to articles?

Here is what this collection of sites offers…

• Free how-to articles


• A place to post how-to articles (written by teachers)


• A "How-to" instruction manual about writing how-to articles.


• Material for Reading and Language Arts classes (Proofreading, Grammar and Writing)


• Material for reports


• Homework Fodder

"How-to" Article Categories

The human interest article categories posted on this site includes:

• Business


• Car Information


• Careers and Education


• Computers


• Consumer Electronics


• Family and Relationships


• Food and Entertaining


• Health


• Hobbies and Gardening


• Holidays and Travel


• Personal Care


• Pet Care


• Sports and Fitness


• Travel Information

How Extensive is this Article Repository

eHow™ uses the Google™ search to find articles on its site.

Here are sample results of our testing how extensive the article collection on eHow™ is:

• "How to Bake a Cake" - 556 articles (Lots of Recipes)


• "How to Fly a Kite" - 86 articles


• "How to make a peanut butter sandwich" - 70 articles


• "How to create a create a science project" - 77 articles


• "How to read a novel" -- 229 articles


• "How to learn fractions" -- 7 articles listed, only two relevant

Equally important, what is not found on the site:

• "How to Skin a Cat" - 0 articles


• "How to Build a Bomb" 0 articles


• "How to fake an illness" - 0 articles


• "How to play pranks" - 3 articles

P. S. Of the articles on playing pranks, two were about building team spirit for the World Cup Crew, and one was about putting shaving cream or toothpaste on a toilet seat during a teen girls sleep over party.

How-to Article Writing

The weHow™ site provides a structured format for creating a "How-to" article.

Sections of the weHow™ article-building technology include:

• Title


• Article Category


• Additional Categories


• Key Words


• Introduction


• Difficulty Rating


• Article Body
• Things you'll Need


• Steps


• Tips


• Warnings
• Conclusion


• Related Articles

Teaching Tools

Structured online content, focusing on human interest content, is a teacher's resource dream.

The options for you and your students for the use of that content are unlimited.

The Classroom Toolkit site provides many tools, resources and templates that can be used with content such as the eHow™ articles.

The eHow™ site presents a variety of options, especially for teacher of Reading and Writing.

Using the eHow™ content for the teaching of reading and writing are just two of the areas where you can start.

Strategies for the Teaching of Reading

Here are a few of the things that you can do with the site's contents during a Reading Class…

• Traditional Reading Skills


• Main Idea


• Sequential Order


• Summarization


• Compare and Contrast


• Fact and Opinion


• Predicting Future Outcomes


• Word Attack Skills
• Context Clues


• Vocabulary Skills


• Copy article, Create Cloze Passage
• Higher-Order Thinking


• Outline Article Content


• Article Analysis


• Article Rating


• Synthesizing two Similar Articles


• Article Evaluation
• Literacy


• Guessing the Author's Purpose


• Analyzing the Author's Voice


• Comparing Author's Styles

For a list of Graphic Organizers that you can use for this purpose, visit the Classroom Toolkit Graphic Organizer Pages.

Or, download the image of our Graphic Organizer CD, burn a CD, and take the entire toolkit with you, whether at home or at school. (See our newsletter article describing the process required to download our Graphic Organizer images.)

Strategies for the Teaching of Writing

Here are a few of the things that you can do with the site's contents during a Writing Class…

• Write "How-to" Articles with the eHow Format


• Project and Demonstrate the Steps for Writing a "How-To" Article


• Conduct a Writer's Conference


• Post an Anthology of your Students' "How-to" Articles
• Place on a Local Computer


• Burn the Articles on a CD


• Ask your District's IT Department to Post the Articles on a Local Server


• Note: Creating an Open Source server is possible using an old computer and free software. However, you need permission to attach servers to your district's network.
• Place the Students' "How-to" Articles on a USB Drive, and collect the articles into an anthology
• Allow paired or group editing of students' "How-to" articles


• Have students pantomime the steps of other students' "How-to" articles, and note which steps seem to be missing

However you decide to use the eHow or WeHow sites, your students can benefit from a structured approach to packaging their creative writings.