Building Background Knowledge
When Older Students Can’t Read
Self-Questioning to Support Reading Comprehension
Pairing Picture Books with Primary Sources
5 Tips for Teaching Novels When Students Won’t Read
Artificial Intelligence-powered tools are coming to the craft of writing
Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning
In this article, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey offer instructional ideas to help your students build speaking and listening skills. Suggestions include reader’s theater, listening stations, presentations, and reciprocal teaching. Technology offers new ways to engage students in
speaking and listening tasks
When Older Students Can’t Read
Self-Questioning to Support Reading Comprehension
Pairing Picture Books with Primary Sources
5 Tips for Teaching Novels When Students Won’t Read
Artificial Intelligence-powered tools are coming to the craft of writing
Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning
In this article, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey offer instructional ideas to help your students build speaking and listening skills. Suggestions include reader’s theater, listening stations, presentations, and reciprocal teaching. Technology offers new ways to engage students in
speaking and listening tasks
Online Books
International Children's Digital Library A massive collection of children books collected by the University of Maryland. A user-friendly interface that lets children search, browse, read, and share books in electronic form. http://www.icdlbooks.org/
Literal https://literalapp.com/
Simbi It provides thousands of narrated books children’s books to read in several languages. If you pay $99 annually, you can get access to premium features, but anyone can read the books for free. That’s nice, but that’s not really what makes this site truly unique. The key feature is that the books are narrated by young people all around the world, and any student can provide an audio narration of any book on the platform that can be accessed by other readers. Keep in mind there is an option to read silently without narration
Books That Grow is a digital reading platform featuring fiction and non fiction texts that adapt to the student's reading ability, so that students of varied abilities can read and learn together. Video overview
Reading IQit’s a free site (for teachers and their students) with tons of accessible books (including many with audio), and teachers can create a virtual classroom for their students.In many ways it looks like Epic!, though in Reading IQ students it seems that students can read the books at home for free
Explore the K-12 Section of The Open Library The Open Library provides vistors with the opportunity to search for, browse through, and read eBooks. The Open Library is a collection of more than one million ebook titles. I recently revisited the Open Library and noticed a couple of new-to-me things. First, there is now a virtual bookshelf explorer that you can use to browse through books much like wandering through a library's bookshelves. Second, there is now a dedicated K-12 section of The Open Library. www.freetech4teachers.com
Capstone Interactive eBooks A library of more than 800 unlimited use, interactive eBooks for grades 3-6 on the topics of science and social studies. High-interest texts include highlighting and read-aloud capabilities
Footsteps 2 Brilliance offers a number of bilingual (English/Spanish) “talking books” for early readers (and ELLs). Students just have to go to the site and click on one of the book covers.
Meta (also known as Facebook) has begun a program called No Language Left Behind They are developing an Artificial Intelligence tool to translate into two-hundred languages. As part of this bigger project, they have created one called “Stories Told Through Translation.” Here’s how they describe it:This demo translates books from their languages of origin such as Indonesian, Somali and Burmese, into more languages for readers—with hundreds available in the coming months. If you scroll down on their site, you can check out five of these translated stories. Assuming they follow-through on the numbers of stories they plan to translate, this could be a treasure trove for ELLs and their teachers.
Science Journal for Kids and Teens Free reports on cutting-edge, peer-reviewed science research adapted for students and their teachers. Articles can be selected according to reading level (elementary school, lower high school, middle school, upper high school) and/or subject field (biodiversity and conservation, biology, energy and climate, food and agriculture, health and medicine, physical science, pollution, social science, technology, water resources).
Magic Blox A large and growing collection of eBooks for kids 1 to 13 years old, your children get to enjoy new books all the time from award winning authors and publishers from around the world. In addition to titles you are familiar with from traditional publishers, they also have the opportunity to discover new stories from authors they've never heard of, or try out new languages they've never seen.
ReadingIQ library ( gr K - 7) are free high-interest and cover a wide range of genres. Students can access them on desktops, tablets, or phones and switch between devices too. When students open up ReadingIQ, they’ll find award-winning titles (including Caldecott and Newbery Medal winners) as well as new books added regularly.
From Primers to Fairy Tales—Historical Children’s LiteratureFrom primers meant to teach spelling and math, to fairy tales, historical children’s books tell historians and modern readers a great deal about the mores of a given time. Now anyone can explore more than 6,000 historical titles online through the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Literature. The Library is known for comparative editions of books, with special emphasis on Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Glose for Education gr 6 - 12 An online e-reading platform where teachers and students can independently or collaboratively read and interact with texts. Teachers invite their students to join via a class code and choose from a library of over 4,000 free classics or a selection of paid book purchases. Teachers share books with their classes, and students interact by highlighting text, annotating, starting discussions, asking questions, or posting emoji reactions.
Amazon Free Kids eBooksAmazon features various collections of free children ebooks. These collections span various topics and themes including: children's animal' s books; children's arts and music books, children's biographies, children's early learning books, children's humor, children's literature, children's science fiction and fantasy books, children's science and nature books, children's geography and cultures, and many more.
Novels on Location helps readers find novels according to the story's geographical setting. When you visit Novels on Location you can find novels by clicking on the placemarks that you see or by using the location search bar in the upper, right corner of the site. If you want to contribute to Novels on Location you can do so very quickly by simply entering a location then entering the title and author of your favorite book set in that location. www.freetech4teachers.com
An Ocean of Books is a Google Arts & Culture experimental site. An Ocean of Books is a concept map of authors and their books. The purpose of An Ocean of Books is to represent authors' footprints on the web and their relationships, via the web, to other authors. The size of an author's presence on the web is displayed as an island on An Ocean of Books. The authors' presences on the web isn't a reflection of social media rather it's a reflection of frequency of search and content published about them and their works. www.freetech4teachers.com
Tar Heel Reader. It has audio support for the text It makes it as simple as you can get for students to create their own “talking” books using images from Flickr.
StoryWeaver digital library now has thousands of story books in over 100 languages.
Unite for Literacy ( K - 4) Provides a variety of books that celebrate the languages and cultures of international communities with the goal of cultivating a life-long love of reading. Aimed at school-age children, categories include, earth, animals, STEM, family, create and play, know and learn, technology, and more. Some books are available in multiple languages and some are audio. The site is gorgeous, easy-to-navigate, with bright, visual, colorful books to entice readers. Books are read online.
Story Share Provides books and stories aimed at older students who read below grade level, specifically ensuring that the content is interesting at their age, and readable at their level.
Prism Prism is a collaborative approach to reading books, poetry, and other written material whether for a class or personal entertainment. It includes thousands of books with comments, notes, and highlights from people who have read them. Notes are color-coded so readers can categorize them properly and readers know how many people contributed to the shared input. Resources include The Raven, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Road Not Taken.
The Black Cat Cideb brand, present since the 1970s in the Italian and international educational publishing market, offers a vast catalogue of texts in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian for speakers of Italian as a second language, from graded readers of the texts adopted in secondary schools, Free material provided by Black Cat publishing. It highlights a website that has numerous audio files, activities and videos all based around books that Black Cat publishing offer. You can use this content in a stand alone context but you could also encourage your students to access the content and make use of it for their own learning. The content is nicely linked together, so there are audio files linked to worksheets and videos that set up the context of the material.
Campfire by Freak’n Genius brings stories to life in an entirely new way. As a companion to physical children’s books, the app makes storytime an immersive, fun, and screen-free experience.
StoryBots Classroom teachers set-up free virtual classrooms for students to read engaging texts with audio support, along with having the option of having student pictures in books to make them stars of their stories. There are also math activities.The materials are geared toward emerging readers, and would be very good for Beginning English Language Learners of all ages.
Mrs. P’s Magic Story- book Library professional actress dramatizes children classics.
Find A Book To find the reading level of professionally published material, teachers and students can visit Find A Book which allows users for free to type in any book and find the reading level of that book, or perhaps more powerful they can type in their reading level and interest and build a custom reading list on the subjects that interest the reader most. Additionally, there is an age slider that allows you to Move the sliders to adjust search results by age-appropriateness. http://lexile.com/findabook/ ---- watch more
Listen and Read is a set of 54 non-fiction stories from Scholastic for K-2 students. The stories are feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into eight categories: social studies, science, plants and flowers, environmental stories, civics and government, animals, American history, and community.
Story Shares Middle and High School Collaborative digital literacy hub provides relevant and readable content for students who read below grade level beyond elementary school. How to Guide
KidLit TV a diverse group of parents, educators, librarians, kid lit creators, and award winning filmmakers working together to create ways to reinforce an appreciation of reading.
seventeen classic stories that have been turned into animated videos that are now available on the web.
Big Universe
http://www.biguniverse.com/
Big Universe is a web community devoted to beautiful children's picture books. READ hundreds of offerings from today's best children's book publishers, CREATE e-books with the help of an easy-to-use Author Tool, and CONNECT with other Big Universe members to share your creations and to learn what books they have read,
created, or recommend.
Google Literacy A Web site dedicated to literacy, pulling together its books, video, mapping, and blogging services to help teachers and educational organizations share reading resources. As part of the project, Google has asked literacy groups around the world to upload video segments explaining and demonstrating their successful teaching programs. The service also uses Google's mapping technology to help literacy organizations find each other, and it offers links to reading resources.
Shakespeare for Kids gr. 6-12
Explore full texts of plays in PDF format, word games and puzzles, historical lessons (some are interactive), and fun facts about Shakespeare and his theater. A word of caution: many of the activities on this site require prior knowledge of Shakespearean plays and characters. Choose wisely based on the level and language skills of your students, and the depth of your study of Shakespeare. Use to introduce the Elizabethan era, review important concepts, or extend a literature unit with a bit of history. http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=588
Play the Knave is a video game that helps users design actor-avatars they can direct with their bodies around virtual theater spaces.
My Shakespeare - Free media-rich, full-text online editions of Shakespeare's plays with interactive content, videos, contemporary translations, study tools, and more.
Shakespeare Uncovered is a collection of videos and lesson plans hosted on PBS Learning Media. The collection is organized into twenty-one smaller, thematically collections. Some of the themes are "Shakespeare and History," "The Use of Soliloquy," and "Gender Roles in Shakespeare." Each collection includes short, documentary video clips, reading materials, and discussion questions. And like almost any new U.S.-based education site launching today, Shakespeare Uncovered includes a list of Common Core standards that can addressed through the use of the materials on the site.
3D Adaptation of Shakespeare’s HamletCommonwealth Shakespeare Company has taken Shakespeare’s most iconic play to the cutting edge of immersive storytelling in Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, using the power of virtual reality (VR) to plunge viewers into Hamlet’s harrowing journey. This cinematic 360-degree adaptation explores new dimensions of the photoplay medium by casting the viewer as the Ghost of Hamlet’s dead father. In this role as an omniscient observer, guide, and participant, viewers get a sense of agency and urgency throughout the 60-minute experience. The film plays out in a single location, at the center of a large, rundown hall with a stage to one side. It is a cavernous room outfitted with lamps, a collection of shabby and ornate furniture, a patchwork of rugs, and an old car. Actors move around the room, encouraging viewers to explore the space. Sometimes a sound that seems to come from over the viewer’s shoulder is a prompt to turn around. Hamlet 360 was released by WGBH, a PBS member station in Boston. It is hosted on the station’s YouTube page, where it can be viewed in 3D using a VR headset or in two dimensions on a desktop or mobile device.
12 Animated Plays of William Shakespeare is a YouTube channel containing twelve playlists ten of which are animated adaptations of Shakespeare's most famous plays. Some of the animated plays that appear in the Shakespeare Animated playlist are Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, MacBeth, and The Taming of the Shrew.
MyShakespeare is a resource for teaching Shakespeare in the digital age. Currently three plays are available: Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, and Macbeth (Julius Caesar is coming soon). The site has interactive, full texts of each play with accompanying footnotes and multimedia resources. Each play includes complete audio recordings that emphasize clarity and comprehension; contemporary translations to make the language more approachable; popup notes offering insights into literary devices; animated videos that explore the play and spark further discussion; performances of key scenes to bring the play to life; and interviews with characters about the events unfolding in the play and providing insight into the characters’ thoughts, feelings, and motivations
Shakespeare's Language | In Search of Shakespeare | Grades 6-12
One of the difficulties many teachers face when teaching Shakespeare is language accessibility. This activity helps students to translate Shakespeare's language into modern vernacular- and ends with some surprising and entertaining results! View Lesson Pla
7 Resources for Studying and Reading Shakespeare - videos, animations, insults in plays and more
Stratford Festival in Canada is commemorating the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death by making his plays accessible to a generation raised on the Internet. The festival has unveiled an online teaching platform that will include each of Shakespeare’s scripts, a film clip of every scene, and notes to understand each piece of dialogue. King Lear is the first play to be offered using these tools. More titles will be added as part of the festivals to capture on film the complete works of Shakespeare over the next 10 years. Created by the Festival’s Education Department in collaboration with D2L Corporation, the free toolkit—called PerformancePlus—is targeted at students and teachers in grades 9–12 but is available to all. Click Here to Visit Website
Crash Course videos about English literature includes two videos about Romeo & Juliet.
Collection of Shakespeare resources. The LiveBinder has a section for Shakespeare in general and sections devoted to Romeo & Juliet, MacBeth, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night.
Search ebooks.com returns a listing of all text that contains the search word. http://www.searchebooks.com/
Reading Room at the Internet Public Library offers books, magazines and newspaper as well as special collections that range from Native American Authors to the US Presidents and links to special multimedia exhibits. Available as text (.txt) files. http://www.ipl.org/div/reading
Bibliomania Over 2000 classic books and short stories. http://www.bibliomania.com/
Reading A-Z: K- 5. 30 free books to print out. http://www.readinga-z.com/newfiles/preview.html
Storytimeforme - http://www.storytimeforme.com/ FREE animated storybooks for primary students! Though it has a limited library, it is sure to grow and the concept is quite nice. The book is animated and narrated- and phrases are highlighted as they are read aloud. Students can also click on any word to hear its pronunciation.
Read Alouds Well curated collection
Baldwin Project: http://www.mainlesson.com/main/displayfeature.php free printable copies of children books and stories from 1882- 1922
Character Scrapbook : Allows students to analyse the characters in books http://digitaltoolsforteachers.blogspot.com/2010/04/character-scrapbook.html
Storybird http://storybird.com/ Free online publishing and stories by others you can read. Also has the capabilities to write cooperative stories.
Smories http://www.smories.com/Collection of stories, told by young students but including subtitles. Video tutorial
GenieBooks - Decodable books in Powerpoint http://www.auburn.edu/~murrag1/bookindex.html
Into the Book - Excellent reading comprehension resource - Using Prior Knowledge, Making Connections, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Summarizing, Evaluating and Synthesizing. K-4 http://reading.ecb.org/
Browser Books - "This website was created to allow beginning readers to read books on their web browser. Readers can click on the triangle in the lower right-hand corner of each page to turn the pages. If they are unsure of a word, they can click on it to hear a child's voice read the word to them. The books have been sorted by level and by subject according to the curriculum." (from the website) http://staff.prairiesouth.ca/~cassidy.kathy/browserbooks/index.htm
Make Your Own Books Resources : Also includes listing of children's literature that includes math concepts in the story line http://teacherweb.com/TX/FriscoTechnology/kimhunt/
Book Builder create and share your own books http://bookbuilder.cast.org/
Tikatok
Write and publish their stories. Teachers can set up classroom accounts and manage their own student accounts. The site includes story starters, prompts, and collaborative options. Students can share the stories with coauthors, family,
friends. Parents can order printed copy of the students book in hardcover or softcover. http://www.tikatok.com/
Books to download: K-5. Free membership. Download books including ones that focus on phonic concepts. http://www.learningpage.com
Children's eLibrary : 30 days free trial. You can download the multimedia books during the trial period. You can browse by age and subject area. http://childrenselibrary.com/welcomeback.php
Flat Stanley Project: Students make their own Flat Stanley and start a journal about him which is passed on to other students who continue the journal. Journals are published online. http://flatstanley.enoreo.on.ca/
Merpy.Com : K-2. Short illustrated online books. http://magickeys.com/books/index.html
Antelope Publishing: K-8. Illustrated books and poetry. http://www.ongoing-tales.com/contents.html
Tumblebooks: Animated children books. Free trial subscription http://www.tumblebooks.com
Curious George
Students can engage in thinking activities. Includes investigations about electric circuits, gears, numbers and shapes. http://pbskids.org/curiousgeorge/
Online Literature Library: classic literature books. http://www.literature.org
Storyline Online
A program of the Screen Actors Guild, and features streaming video storybooks read by actors such as James Earl Jones, Amanda Bynes, Hector Elizondo and Melissa Gilbert. The books aren't sorted into categories, so you'll need to scroll through the books to find one that catches your eye.http://www.storylineonline.net/
Center for the Study of Books in Spanish for Children and Adolescents
A useful site for books, workshops and materials related to books in Spanish for children and young adults. Contains information from a number of sponsor-publishers as well as links to other sites. http://www.csusm.edu/csb/english/
Lookybook: Think of Lookybook as the test track for picture books. Picture books are all about the pictures and this site lets you see an entire book before you buy it. No longer will you order a picture book online hoping the inside is as good as the cover. http://www.lookybook.com/index.php
Gutenberg Project: First and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks.http://www.gutenberg.org/ Audio versions of books http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project
KOL Jr. Stories
KOL Jr. (published by AOL for kids ages two to five) organizes their narrated storybooks into: Animals, Arthur, Fairy Tales, Family and Rhyming. Whichever you choose, you'll be rewarded with read-along words highlighted in red as the storyteller reads the story out loud, and the pages (with their original illustrations) are turned automatically. The stories take about forty seconds to load on a DSL, so be prepared to wait a bit if your connection is slower. http://kids.aol.com/KOL/1/KOLJrStories
Mrs. P Storyteller
classic children's stories, read along options, engaging personal anecdotes, animated games and clever presentation. If you have a high speed connection, you can turn on more even more animated fun by clicking on Start Here, and selecting options such as "Bookcase titles say funny tag galaxy http://www.mrsp.com/
Speakaboos is a delightful find, chock full of classic video storybooks read by actors, along with games, e-cards, sing-along karaoke tunes, and printable coloring pages. The stories are divided into Favorites (such as Arthur and Holidays), Fables, Nursery Rhymes, Fairy Tales, Folk Tales and Songs. A useful feature is "More on This Album: Play All" which will queue up all the songs (or stories) in a particular album. Some of the songs are available for free download while others are for sale in the iTunes Store. http://www.speakaboos.com/
More E-books
http://www.free-ebooks.net/
http://www.mslit.com/default.asp?mjr=FRE manybooks.net
http://www.wowio.com/index.asp
http://www.fictionwise.com/ inexpensive
http://www.planetebook.com/
http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/
http://www.sillybooks.net/default.htm
International Children's Digital Library A massive collection of children books collected by the University of Maryland. A user-friendly interface that lets children search, browse, read, and share books in electronic form. http://www.icdlbooks.org/
Literal https://literalapp.com/
- Over 500 free books presented in an interactive format resembling text messages in a group chat.
- Characters have profile pictures that the user can edit if they want.
- The user can read the book in four modes including Auto Load, Audio Reader, Tap to Load, and Free Scroll.
- Support tools include definitions and translations for any text.
- A paid version is available with even more books and features.
Simbi It provides thousands of narrated books children’s books to read in several languages. If you pay $99 annually, you can get access to premium features, but anyone can read the books for free. That’s nice, but that’s not really what makes this site truly unique. The key feature is that the books are narrated by young people all around the world, and any student can provide an audio narration of any book on the platform that can be accessed by other readers. Keep in mind there is an option to read silently without narration
Books That Grow is a digital reading platform featuring fiction and non fiction texts that adapt to the student's reading ability, so that students of varied abilities can read and learn together. Video overview
Reading IQit’s a free site (for teachers and their students) with tons of accessible books (including many with audio), and teachers can create a virtual classroom for their students.In many ways it looks like Epic!, though in Reading IQ students it seems that students can read the books at home for free
Explore the K-12 Section of The Open Library The Open Library provides vistors with the opportunity to search for, browse through, and read eBooks. The Open Library is a collection of more than one million ebook titles. I recently revisited the Open Library and noticed a couple of new-to-me things. First, there is now a virtual bookshelf explorer that you can use to browse through books much like wandering through a library's bookshelves. Second, there is now a dedicated K-12 section of The Open Library. www.freetech4teachers.com
Capstone Interactive eBooks A library of more than 800 unlimited use, interactive eBooks for grades 3-6 on the topics of science and social studies. High-interest texts include highlighting and read-aloud capabilities
Footsteps 2 Brilliance offers a number of bilingual (English/Spanish) “talking books” for early readers (and ELLs). Students just have to go to the site and click on one of the book covers.
Meta (also known as Facebook) has begun a program called No Language Left Behind They are developing an Artificial Intelligence tool to translate into two-hundred languages. As part of this bigger project, they have created one called “Stories Told Through Translation.” Here’s how they describe it:This demo translates books from their languages of origin such as Indonesian, Somali and Burmese, into more languages for readers—with hundreds available in the coming months. If you scroll down on their site, you can check out five of these translated stories. Assuming they follow-through on the numbers of stories they plan to translate, this could be a treasure trove for ELLs and their teachers.
Science Journal for Kids and Teens Free reports on cutting-edge, peer-reviewed science research adapted for students and their teachers. Articles can be selected according to reading level (elementary school, lower high school, middle school, upper high school) and/or subject field (biodiversity and conservation, biology, energy and climate, food and agriculture, health and medicine, physical science, pollution, social science, technology, water resources).
Magic Blox A large and growing collection of eBooks for kids 1 to 13 years old, your children get to enjoy new books all the time from award winning authors and publishers from around the world. In addition to titles you are familiar with from traditional publishers, they also have the opportunity to discover new stories from authors they've never heard of, or try out new languages they've never seen.
ReadingIQ library ( gr K - 7) are free high-interest and cover a wide range of genres. Students can access them on desktops, tablets, or phones and switch between devices too. When students open up ReadingIQ, they’ll find award-winning titles (including Caldecott and Newbery Medal winners) as well as new books added regularly.
From Primers to Fairy Tales—Historical Children’s LiteratureFrom primers meant to teach spelling and math, to fairy tales, historical children’s books tell historians and modern readers a great deal about the mores of a given time. Now anyone can explore more than 6,000 historical titles online through the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Literature. The Library is known for comparative editions of books, with special emphasis on Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Glose for Education gr 6 - 12 An online e-reading platform where teachers and students can independently or collaboratively read and interact with texts. Teachers invite their students to join via a class code and choose from a library of over 4,000 free classics or a selection of paid book purchases. Teachers share books with their classes, and students interact by highlighting text, annotating, starting discussions, asking questions, or posting emoji reactions.
Amazon Free Kids eBooksAmazon features various collections of free children ebooks. These collections span various topics and themes including: children's animal' s books; children's arts and music books, children's biographies, children's early learning books, children's humor, children's literature, children's science fiction and fantasy books, children's science and nature books, children's geography and cultures, and many more.
Novels on Location helps readers find novels according to the story's geographical setting. When you visit Novels on Location you can find novels by clicking on the placemarks that you see or by using the location search bar in the upper, right corner of the site. If you want to contribute to Novels on Location you can do so very quickly by simply entering a location then entering the title and author of your favorite book set in that location. www.freetech4teachers.com
An Ocean of Books is a Google Arts & Culture experimental site. An Ocean of Books is a concept map of authors and their books. The purpose of An Ocean of Books is to represent authors' footprints on the web and their relationships, via the web, to other authors. The size of an author's presence on the web is displayed as an island on An Ocean of Books. The authors' presences on the web isn't a reflection of social media rather it's a reflection of frequency of search and content published about them and their works. www.freetech4teachers.com
Tar Heel Reader. It has audio support for the text It makes it as simple as you can get for students to create their own “talking” books using images from Flickr.
StoryWeaver digital library now has thousands of story books in over 100 languages.
Unite for Literacy ( K - 4) Provides a variety of books that celebrate the languages and cultures of international communities with the goal of cultivating a life-long love of reading. Aimed at school-age children, categories include, earth, animals, STEM, family, create and play, know and learn, technology, and more. Some books are available in multiple languages and some are audio. The site is gorgeous, easy-to-navigate, with bright, visual, colorful books to entice readers. Books are read online.
Story Share Provides books and stories aimed at older students who read below grade level, specifically ensuring that the content is interesting at their age, and readable at their level.
Prism Prism is a collaborative approach to reading books, poetry, and other written material whether for a class or personal entertainment. It includes thousands of books with comments, notes, and highlights from people who have read them. Notes are color-coded so readers can categorize them properly and readers know how many people contributed to the shared input. Resources include The Raven, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Road Not Taken.
The Black Cat Cideb brand, present since the 1970s in the Italian and international educational publishing market, offers a vast catalogue of texts in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian for speakers of Italian as a second language, from graded readers of the texts adopted in secondary schools, Free material provided by Black Cat publishing. It highlights a website that has numerous audio files, activities and videos all based around books that Black Cat publishing offer. You can use this content in a stand alone context but you could also encourage your students to access the content and make use of it for their own learning. The content is nicely linked together, so there are audio files linked to worksheets and videos that set up the context of the material.
Campfire by Freak’n Genius brings stories to life in an entirely new way. As a companion to physical children’s books, the app makes storytime an immersive, fun, and screen-free experience.
StoryBots Classroom teachers set-up free virtual classrooms for students to read engaging texts with audio support, along with having the option of having student pictures in books to make them stars of their stories. There are also math activities.The materials are geared toward emerging readers, and would be very good for Beginning English Language Learners of all ages.
Mrs. P’s Magic Story- book Library professional actress dramatizes children classics.
Find A Book To find the reading level of professionally published material, teachers and students can visit Find A Book which allows users for free to type in any book and find the reading level of that book, or perhaps more powerful they can type in their reading level and interest and build a custom reading list on the subjects that interest the reader most. Additionally, there is an age slider that allows you to Move the sliders to adjust search results by age-appropriateness. http://lexile.com/findabook/ ---- watch more
Listen and Read is a set of 54 non-fiction stories from Scholastic for K-2 students. The stories are feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into eight categories: social studies, science, plants and flowers, environmental stories, civics and government, animals, American history, and community.
Story Shares Middle and High School Collaborative digital literacy hub provides relevant and readable content for students who read below grade level beyond elementary school. How to Guide
KidLit TV a diverse group of parents, educators, librarians, kid lit creators, and award winning filmmakers working together to create ways to reinforce an appreciation of reading.
- STORYMAKERS, our flagship series, is an entertaining talk show highlighting bestselling authors and illustrators in the kid lit world. The series is hosted by Rocco Staino, Contributing Editor at School Library Journal, a contributing writer at The Huffington Post, and Director of Empire State Center for the Book, affiliate of the U.S. Library of Congress.
- READ OUT LOUD – Enjoy story time with authors at KLTV HQ!
- READY SET DRAW! – Get inspired to draw with talented illustrators from children’s literature.
- FIELD TRIP – Our crew hits the road to explore the world of kid lit.
seventeen classic stories that have been turned into animated videos that are now available on the web.
Big Universe
http://www.biguniverse.com/
Big Universe is a web community devoted to beautiful children's picture books. READ hundreds of offerings from today's best children's book publishers, CREATE e-books with the help of an easy-to-use Author Tool, and CONNECT with other Big Universe members to share your creations and to learn what books they have read,
created, or recommend.
Google Literacy A Web site dedicated to literacy, pulling together its books, video, mapping, and blogging services to help teachers and educational organizations share reading resources. As part of the project, Google has asked literacy groups around the world to upload video segments explaining and demonstrating their successful teaching programs. The service also uses Google's mapping technology to help literacy organizations find each other, and it offers links to reading resources.
Shakespeare for Kids gr. 6-12
Explore full texts of plays in PDF format, word games and puzzles, historical lessons (some are interactive), and fun facts about Shakespeare and his theater. A word of caution: many of the activities on this site require prior knowledge of Shakespearean plays and characters. Choose wisely based on the level and language skills of your students, and the depth of your study of Shakespeare. Use to introduce the Elizabethan era, review important concepts, or extend a literature unit with a bit of history. http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=588
Play the Knave is a video game that helps users design actor-avatars they can direct with their bodies around virtual theater spaces.
My Shakespeare - Free media-rich, full-text online editions of Shakespeare's plays with interactive content, videos, contemporary translations, study tools, and more.
Shakespeare Uncovered is a collection of videos and lesson plans hosted on PBS Learning Media. The collection is organized into twenty-one smaller, thematically collections. Some of the themes are "Shakespeare and History," "The Use of Soliloquy," and "Gender Roles in Shakespeare." Each collection includes short, documentary video clips, reading materials, and discussion questions. And like almost any new U.S.-based education site launching today, Shakespeare Uncovered includes a list of Common Core standards that can addressed through the use of the materials on the site.
3D Adaptation of Shakespeare’s HamletCommonwealth Shakespeare Company has taken Shakespeare’s most iconic play to the cutting edge of immersive storytelling in Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, using the power of virtual reality (VR) to plunge viewers into Hamlet’s harrowing journey. This cinematic 360-degree adaptation explores new dimensions of the photoplay medium by casting the viewer as the Ghost of Hamlet’s dead father. In this role as an omniscient observer, guide, and participant, viewers get a sense of agency and urgency throughout the 60-minute experience. The film plays out in a single location, at the center of a large, rundown hall with a stage to one side. It is a cavernous room outfitted with lamps, a collection of shabby and ornate furniture, a patchwork of rugs, and an old car. Actors move around the room, encouraging viewers to explore the space. Sometimes a sound that seems to come from over the viewer’s shoulder is a prompt to turn around. Hamlet 360 was released by WGBH, a PBS member station in Boston. It is hosted on the station’s YouTube page, where it can be viewed in 3D using a VR headset or in two dimensions on a desktop or mobile device.
12 Animated Plays of William Shakespeare is a YouTube channel containing twelve playlists ten of which are animated adaptations of Shakespeare's most famous plays. Some of the animated plays that appear in the Shakespeare Animated playlist are Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, MacBeth, and The Taming of the Shrew.
MyShakespeare is a resource for teaching Shakespeare in the digital age. Currently three plays are available: Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, and Macbeth (Julius Caesar is coming soon). The site has interactive, full texts of each play with accompanying footnotes and multimedia resources. Each play includes complete audio recordings that emphasize clarity and comprehension; contemporary translations to make the language more approachable; popup notes offering insights into literary devices; animated videos that explore the play and spark further discussion; performances of key scenes to bring the play to life; and interviews with characters about the events unfolding in the play and providing insight into the characters’ thoughts, feelings, and motivations
Shakespeare's Language | In Search of Shakespeare | Grades 6-12
One of the difficulties many teachers face when teaching Shakespeare is language accessibility. This activity helps students to translate Shakespeare's language into modern vernacular- and ends with some surprising and entertaining results! View Lesson Pla
7 Resources for Studying and Reading Shakespeare - videos, animations, insults in plays and more
Stratford Festival in Canada is commemorating the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death by making his plays accessible to a generation raised on the Internet. The festival has unveiled an online teaching platform that will include each of Shakespeare’s scripts, a film clip of every scene, and notes to understand each piece of dialogue. King Lear is the first play to be offered using these tools. More titles will be added as part of the festivals to capture on film the complete works of Shakespeare over the next 10 years. Created by the Festival’s Education Department in collaboration with D2L Corporation, the free toolkit—called PerformancePlus—is targeted at students and teachers in grades 9–12 but is available to all. Click Here to Visit Website
Crash Course videos about English literature includes two videos about Romeo & Juliet.
Collection of Shakespeare resources. The LiveBinder has a section for Shakespeare in general and sections devoted to Romeo & Juliet, MacBeth, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night.
Search ebooks.com returns a listing of all text that contains the search word. http://www.searchebooks.com/
Reading Room at the Internet Public Library offers books, magazines and newspaper as well as special collections that range from Native American Authors to the US Presidents and links to special multimedia exhibits. Available as text (.txt) files. http://www.ipl.org/div/reading
Bibliomania Over 2000 classic books and short stories. http://www.bibliomania.com/
Reading A-Z: K- 5. 30 free books to print out. http://www.readinga-z.com/newfiles/preview.html
Storytimeforme - http://www.storytimeforme.com/ FREE animated storybooks for primary students! Though it has a limited library, it is sure to grow and the concept is quite nice. The book is animated and narrated- and phrases are highlighted as they are read aloud. Students can also click on any word to hear its pronunciation.
Read Alouds Well curated collection
Baldwin Project: http://www.mainlesson.com/main/displayfeature.php free printable copies of children books and stories from 1882- 1922
Character Scrapbook : Allows students to analyse the characters in books http://digitaltoolsforteachers.blogspot.com/2010/04/character-scrapbook.html
Storybird http://storybird.com/ Free online publishing and stories by others you can read. Also has the capabilities to write cooperative stories.
Smories http://www.smories.com/Collection of stories, told by young students but including subtitles. Video tutorial
GenieBooks - Decodable books in Powerpoint http://www.auburn.edu/~murrag1/bookindex.html
Into the Book - Excellent reading comprehension resource - Using Prior Knowledge, Making Connections, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Summarizing, Evaluating and Synthesizing. K-4 http://reading.ecb.org/
Browser Books - "This website was created to allow beginning readers to read books on their web browser. Readers can click on the triangle in the lower right-hand corner of each page to turn the pages. If they are unsure of a word, they can click on it to hear a child's voice read the word to them. The books have been sorted by level and by subject according to the curriculum." (from the website) http://staff.prairiesouth.ca/~cassidy.kathy/browserbooks/index.htm
Make Your Own Books Resources : Also includes listing of children's literature that includes math concepts in the story line http://teacherweb.com/TX/FriscoTechnology/kimhunt/
Book Builder create and share your own books http://bookbuilder.cast.org/
Tikatok
Write and publish their stories. Teachers can set up classroom accounts and manage their own student accounts. The site includes story starters, prompts, and collaborative options. Students can share the stories with coauthors, family,
friends. Parents can order printed copy of the students book in hardcover or softcover. http://www.tikatok.com/
Books to download: K-5. Free membership. Download books including ones that focus on phonic concepts. http://www.learningpage.com
Children's eLibrary : 30 days free trial. You can download the multimedia books during the trial period. You can browse by age and subject area. http://childrenselibrary.com/welcomeback.php
Flat Stanley Project: Students make their own Flat Stanley and start a journal about him which is passed on to other students who continue the journal. Journals are published online. http://flatstanley.enoreo.on.ca/
Merpy.Com : K-2. Short illustrated online books. http://magickeys.com/books/index.html
Antelope Publishing: K-8. Illustrated books and poetry. http://www.ongoing-tales.com/contents.html
Tumblebooks: Animated children books. Free trial subscription http://www.tumblebooks.com
Curious George
Students can engage in thinking activities. Includes investigations about electric circuits, gears, numbers and shapes. http://pbskids.org/curiousgeorge/
Online Literature Library: classic literature books. http://www.literature.org
Storyline Online
A program of the Screen Actors Guild, and features streaming video storybooks read by actors such as James Earl Jones, Amanda Bynes, Hector Elizondo and Melissa Gilbert. The books aren't sorted into categories, so you'll need to scroll through the books to find one that catches your eye.http://www.storylineonline.net/
Center for the Study of Books in Spanish for Children and Adolescents
A useful site for books, workshops and materials related to books in Spanish for children and young adults. Contains information from a number of sponsor-publishers as well as links to other sites. http://www.csusm.edu/csb/english/
Lookybook: Think of Lookybook as the test track for picture books. Picture books are all about the pictures and this site lets you see an entire book before you buy it. No longer will you order a picture book online hoping the inside is as good as the cover. http://www.lookybook.com/index.php
Gutenberg Project: First and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks.http://www.gutenberg.org/ Audio versions of books http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project
KOL Jr. Stories
KOL Jr. (published by AOL for kids ages two to five) organizes their narrated storybooks into: Animals, Arthur, Fairy Tales, Family and Rhyming. Whichever you choose, you'll be rewarded with read-along words highlighted in red as the storyteller reads the story out loud, and the pages (with their original illustrations) are turned automatically. The stories take about forty seconds to load on a DSL, so be prepared to wait a bit if your connection is slower. http://kids.aol.com/KOL/1/KOLJrStories
Mrs. P Storyteller
classic children's stories, read along options, engaging personal anecdotes, animated games and clever presentation. If you have a high speed connection, you can turn on more even more animated fun by clicking on Start Here, and selecting options such as "Bookcase titles say funny tag galaxy http://www.mrsp.com/
Speakaboos is a delightful find, chock full of classic video storybooks read by actors, along with games, e-cards, sing-along karaoke tunes, and printable coloring pages. The stories are divided into Favorites (such as Arthur and Holidays), Fables, Nursery Rhymes, Fairy Tales, Folk Tales and Songs. A useful feature is "More on This Album: Play All" which will queue up all the songs (or stories) in a particular album. Some of the songs are available for free download while others are for sale in the iTunes Store. http://www.speakaboos.com/
More E-books
http://www.free-ebooks.net/
http://www.mslit.com/default.asp?mjr=FRE manybooks.net
http://www.wowio.com/index.asp
http://www.fictionwise.com/ inexpensive
http://www.planetebook.com/
http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/
http://www.sillybooks.net/default.htm
App Books
Epic
‘Welcome to Epic! - the leading digital library for kids, where kids can explore their interests and learn with instant, unlimited access to 25,000 high-quality ebooks, audiobooks, learning videos, and quizzes for kids 12 and under.
Reading IQ it’s a free site (for teachers and their students) with tons of accessible books (including many with audio), and teachers can create a virtual classroom for their students.In many ways it looks like Epic!, though in Reading IQ students it seems that students can read the books at home for free
Novel Effect iPad app brings stories to life, promotes literacy, sparks imagination, and provides enjoyment for children aged 12 and under. The app follows the voice of users as they read aloud from children’s storybooks, and responds at just the right moment with music, sounds, and character voices.
Google’s Kid Space..Google's free reading app has 2,000 free e-books, and numerous features, including reading the words aloud and having students record what they hear – with artificial intelligence then assessing its accuracy. Teachers can create virtual classrooms and, I assume, monitor student progress (the ability to view student reading histories is not appear to be explicitly spelled out in the teacher’s guide, but I assume that’s the case). The app can be downloaded on Android and IOS devices, and on Chromebooks. It’s unfortunate, however, that it can’t be accessed on the web without the app.
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Weirdwood Manor A fantasy tale in the tradition of “Harry Potter” and “The Golden Compass”, “The Incredible Tales of Weirdwood Manor” is also a beautifully illustrated picture book, a stunningly animated movie, and a challenging series of games and puzzles. Over 30 minutes of story and activities in Book 1; 60-90 minutes in each of Books 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Readlistenlearn has articles that students can read and/or listen to. Teachers can select reading level and isolate vocabulary. There is a free and premium version. Watch this video to learn how to navigate the site and find hidden tools.
PBS Students app designed for students and teachers created by PBS LearningMedia. Students now have access on their iPads to educational videos, quizzes, games, images, and articles that can be tied in with district curriculum. The app correlates with PBS LearningMedia Student Portal which is web based and was launched earlier this year. It is designed for students in grades K-12 so they have safe and trusted access to resources in all subject areas.
StoryBots – Fun and Learning
‘The StoryBots iPhone app makes learning fun for kids 3-8 with 250+ educational books, videos and games featuring characters from the Netflix original series, “Ask the StoryBots" and "StoryBots Super Songs." Used in more than 45,000 classrooms around the world, StoryBots helps your child practice literacy and math skills and explore science, history, behaviors and more. Plus, by adding your child’s photo and name, you can make them the star of the show!’
PlayKids Stories - Books for Kids
‘PlayKids Stories is an amazing library of books and stories for kids 8 and under. Join this space adventure that will nurture your little one’s love of reading. Access a library from all-time favorite stories to modern classics that will spark the imagination.’
‘Welcome to Epic! - the leading digital library for kids, where kids can explore their interests and learn with instant, unlimited access to 25,000 high-quality ebooks, audiobooks, learning videos, and quizzes for kids 12 and under.
Reading IQ it’s a free site (for teachers and their students) with tons of accessible books (including many with audio), and teachers can create a virtual classroom for their students.In many ways it looks like Epic!, though in Reading IQ students it seems that students can read the books at home for free
Novel Effect iPad app brings stories to life, promotes literacy, sparks imagination, and provides enjoyment for children aged 12 and under. The app follows the voice of users as they read aloud from children’s storybooks, and responds at just the right moment with music, sounds, and character voices.
Google’s Kid Space..Google's free reading app has 2,000 free e-books, and numerous features, including reading the words aloud and having students record what they hear – with artificial intelligence then assessing its accuracy. Teachers can create virtual classrooms and, I assume, monitor student progress (the ability to view student reading histories is not appear to be explicitly spelled out in the teacher’s guide, but I assume that’s the case). The app can be downloaded on Android and IOS devices, and on Chromebooks. It’s unfortunate, however, that it can’t be accessed on the web without the app.
x
Weirdwood Manor A fantasy tale in the tradition of “Harry Potter” and “The Golden Compass”, “The Incredible Tales of Weirdwood Manor” is also a beautifully illustrated picture book, a stunningly animated movie, and a challenging series of games and puzzles. Over 30 minutes of story and activities in Book 1; 60-90 minutes in each of Books 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Readlistenlearn has articles that students can read and/or listen to. Teachers can select reading level and isolate vocabulary. There is a free and premium version. Watch this video to learn how to navigate the site and find hidden tools.
PBS Students app designed for students and teachers created by PBS LearningMedia. Students now have access on their iPads to educational videos, quizzes, games, images, and articles that can be tied in with district curriculum. The app correlates with PBS LearningMedia Student Portal which is web based and was launched earlier this year. It is designed for students in grades K-12 so they have safe and trusted access to resources in all subject areas.
StoryBots – Fun and Learning
‘The StoryBots iPhone app makes learning fun for kids 3-8 with 250+ educational books, videos and games featuring characters from the Netflix original series, “Ask the StoryBots" and "StoryBots Super Songs." Used in more than 45,000 classrooms around the world, StoryBots helps your child practice literacy and math skills and explore science, history, behaviors and more. Plus, by adding your child’s photo and name, you can make them the star of the show!’
PlayKids Stories - Books for Kids
‘PlayKids Stories is an amazing library of books and stories for kids 8 and under. Join this space adventure that will nurture your little one’s love of reading. Access a library from all-time favorite stories to modern classics that will spark the imagination.’
Audio Books
LibroVox Audio Books
‘LibriVox Audio Books provides unlimited access to over 50,000 audio books. Each audiobook can be streamed over the internet or downloaded for later use. The LibriVox Audio Books app features classic best sellers and out of print treasures from every genre of literature in more than 30 languages.’
Stories offers access to a huge collection of free audiobooks "including titles across eight different languages,
Simbi It provides thousands of narrated books children’s books to read in several languages. If you pay $99 annually, you can get access to premium features, but anyone can read the books for free. That’s nice, but that’s not really what makes this site truly unique. The key feature is that the books are narrated by young people all around the world, and any student can provide an audio narration of any book on the platform that can be accessed by other readers. Keep in mind there is an option to read silently without narration
Simbi.It provides thousands of narrated books children’s books to read in several languages. If you pay $99 annually, you can get access to premium features, but anyone can read the books for free. That’s nice, but that’s not really what makes this site truly unique. The key feature is that the books are narrated by young people all around the world, and any student can provide an audio narration of any book on the platform that can be accessed by other readers.There’s nothing more motivating than having an authentic audience, and Simbi provides one with tens-of-thousands of them!
Websites to Access Kid's Free Audio Books and Audio Stories
Audio Books by Audiobooks
‘Everything you need is right within the app: claim credits on titles, access your audio book wishlist, view your library, and play your audio books without ever having to visit the website. We add hundreds of new books every week, and your first premium audiobook is free! Plus, we have a library of 7,000 free audio titles for everyone to enjoy.’
Free Audio Books: Our collection of 450 free audio books includes many children’s classics.
CloudBeats
‘Listen to your audiobooks library anywhere directly from Google Drive, DropBox, Box, OneDrive, Amazon Cloud Drive, Mediafire, ownCloud and your personal NAS. Save space on your device as you no longer need to keep large audio files on your iPhone and sync with iTunes. CloudBeats was created to give you a seamless listening and syncing experience.’
Bookmobile Audiobook Player
‘An interface optimized for listening to spoken word content, especially while driving. No sliders, dragging or other controls that are nearly impossible to get right while you are driving. Easy access to the controls that matter most while listening. Get, play and manage audio content from a wide variety of sources: iTunes, Audible.com, Librivox.org, CDs, public library downloads, RSS feeds, Dropbox, and more.’
Audible audio books and podcasts
‘Hear A-list celebrities narrate their favorite stories, enjoy full-cast performances, discover Grammy:registered: award-winning audiobooks, and more. Listen to your audiobooks anytime, anywhere—at home or on the go with our free app. Even if you switch devices, you'll never lose your place.’
Bound - Cloud Audiobooks
‘Listen to your favorite audiobooks. Download from the cloud. Link your cloud storage account. Quickly download your audiobook files. Play your audiobooks in a beautiful modern interface.
Automatically saves your listening position. So you never lose your place…’
‘LibriVox Audio Books provides unlimited access to over 50,000 audio books. Each audiobook can be streamed over the internet or downloaded for later use. The LibriVox Audio Books app features classic best sellers and out of print treasures from every genre of literature in more than 30 languages.’
Stories offers access to a huge collection of free audiobooks "including titles across eight different languages,
Simbi It provides thousands of narrated books children’s books to read in several languages. If you pay $99 annually, you can get access to premium features, but anyone can read the books for free. That’s nice, but that’s not really what makes this site truly unique. The key feature is that the books are narrated by young people all around the world, and any student can provide an audio narration of any book on the platform that can be accessed by other readers. Keep in mind there is an option to read silently without narration
Simbi.It provides thousands of narrated books children’s books to read in several languages. If you pay $99 annually, you can get access to premium features, but anyone can read the books for free. That’s nice, but that’s not really what makes this site truly unique. The key feature is that the books are narrated by young people all around the world, and any student can provide an audio narration of any book on the platform that can be accessed by other readers.There’s nothing more motivating than having an authentic audience, and Simbi provides one with tens-of-thousands of them!
Websites to Access Kid's Free Audio Books and Audio Stories
Audio Books by Audiobooks
‘Everything you need is right within the app: claim credits on titles, access your audio book wishlist, view your library, and play your audio books without ever having to visit the website. We add hundreds of new books every week, and your first premium audiobook is free! Plus, we have a library of 7,000 free audio titles for everyone to enjoy.’
Free Audio Books: Our collection of 450 free audio books includes many children’s classics.
CloudBeats
‘Listen to your audiobooks library anywhere directly from Google Drive, DropBox, Box, OneDrive, Amazon Cloud Drive, Mediafire, ownCloud and your personal NAS. Save space on your device as you no longer need to keep large audio files on your iPhone and sync with iTunes. CloudBeats was created to give you a seamless listening and syncing experience.’
Bookmobile Audiobook Player
‘An interface optimized for listening to spoken word content, especially while driving. No sliders, dragging or other controls that are nearly impossible to get right while you are driving. Easy access to the controls that matter most while listening. Get, play and manage audio content from a wide variety of sources: iTunes, Audible.com, Librivox.org, CDs, public library downloads, RSS feeds, Dropbox, and more.’
Audible audio books and podcasts
‘Hear A-list celebrities narrate their favorite stories, enjoy full-cast performances, discover Grammy:registered: award-winning audiobooks, and more. Listen to your audiobooks anytime, anywhere—at home or on the go with our free app. Even if you switch devices, you'll never lose your place.’
Bound - Cloud Audiobooks
‘Listen to your favorite audiobooks. Download from the cloud. Link your cloud storage account. Quickly download your audiobook files. Play your audiobooks in a beautiful modern interface.
Automatically saves your listening position. So you never lose your place…’
Stories
Starfall: K-2. Interactive phonics-based stories. http://www.starfall.com
Wonderopolis is a site for finding interesting articles to spark your students' imaginations. At its core Wonderopolis offers more than 2400 interesting articles for elementary school and middle school students. Each article covers a different topic that your students might wonder about. For example, today's article is Who Invented Friend Chicken? Every Wonderopolis article is accompanied by a short video and some corresponding images. All of the articles are also accompanied by a short reading comprehension quiz that can be printed or taken online. A vocabulary matching exercise also accompanies the articles on Wonderopolis. www.freetech4teachers.com
Create Stories for Children to Read with AI Pagemaster free. You give it a title and a one or two sentence description of your plot. Then it will almost immediately email you a short story, along with suggestions about how to use it.
Online Interactive stories - clever traditional and new stories http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/interactive/onlinestory.htm
ReadWorks is a free service that provides teachers with hundreds of lesson plans and more than two thousand reading non-fiction and fiction passages aligned to Common Core standards, and you can adjust the reading levels of text. It also includes poems and question sets. The collection is organized by grade level. In the collection you will find poems by Frost, Dickinson, Stevenson, and other notable poets.
Lexile scores are listed for each article along with grade levels and Common Core standards.
With a free ReadWorks account you can search for lessons and reading passages by grade level, lexile score, reading skill, subject area, and text type (fiction or non-fiction). In your ReadWorks account you can create digital binders of the lesson plans and reading passages that you want to use.
ReadWorks Review for Teachers and Students
Posted: 16 Jul 2022 07:45 PM PDT
ReadWorks is a learning website that helps students develop key reading comprehension skills. It offers a wide range of free K-12 reading materials and online assignments. ReadWorks resources can be used to supplement the reading practice done in class.
The purpose of Readworks is to provide students with quality reading materials that enable would them to develop reading skills that can work across different content areas. More specifically, these resources address three key areas: comprehension strategies, background knowledge, and vocabulary skills.
As a teacher, you can create classes in ReadWorks and invite students to join. Students can sign in with their own Google account using the generated class code you share with them or you can invite them using a roster. You can also organize students into different groups and differentiate instruction based on students needs.
ReadWorks offers several features to enhance reading instruction and learning. Some of these features include:
1. ReadWorks Article-A-Day
ReadWorks Article-A-Day helps students grow their background knowledge and develop their vocabulary skills through a daily reading routine of 10 to 15 minutes. Students select from the hand-curated text sets and read across various topics. A number of these sets include vocabulary practice activities to help with vocabulary building. There is also an integrated graphic organizer called Meaning Mapper which helps students build connections among vocabulary words.
To make the most out of this activity, students are recommended to read four or five articles each week and to keep this reading routine going for at least 15 or more weeks. "Article-A-Day allows for differentiation by making the selection and assigning of texts for different students easier, including ELLs, struggling readers, and students who need a challenge."
Teachers can also turn on ELL and Extra Support for Article-A-Day assignment allowing students to access a number of extra features including access to English audio versions of every text and the ability to provide directions for Article-A-Day and read aloud by a fluent reader in a pre-defined language.
2. ReadWorks Paired Texts
ReadWorks Paired texts are two articles on the same topic or theme. The purpose behind paired texts is to provide students with multiple perspectives on the topic thus prompting them to critically engage with texts by drawing connections and making inferences. Paired Texts come with various comprehension check questions that encourage students to make connections between the two texts.
Some paired texts include read-aloud option that teachers can turn on/off when assigning the set. When activated, paired texts are read aloud for students which is a great accessibility feature for students with special needs especially those that are low in vision. Teachers can turn on audio for the entire class, specific groups, or for individual students.
3. Audio and text-to-speech
All texts provided by ReadWorks include text-to-speech functionality enabling students to access and listen to audio versions of their reading materials. Also, a number of these texts offer human-voice audio option allowing students to hear texts read by fluent readers. Students can select their own playback speed and slow down or speed up as they like.
4. ReadWorks Student Library
The purpose behind ReadWorks Students Library is to foster independent reading by providing students with quality materials that they can read at their own pace without worrying about assessment. Students read for the joy of reading and learning. Student library is a feature included with the class setup.
As a teacher, you can allow students' access to the library where they can browse through a wide variety of nonfiction and fiction reading passages. "Students have access to all reading passages at their grade level as well as passages below their grade level and two grades higher. Each day, the library suggests new reading passages based on students' interests and passages they have enjoyed in the past. Teachers can see in Assignments & Progress how much their students have read and what they’ve enjoyed!"
5. Reading Mindset Snapshot
Reading Mindset Snapshot is a unique feature provided by ReadWorks. It allows teachers to know their students better as readers. Reading Mindset Snapshot consists of a number of questions focused on students feelings about reading and the topics that interest them. Students use emojis and thumbs up/down to answer these questions.
Image credit:Readworks.org
Teachers assign Reading Mindset Snapshot to their students preferably at the start of the school year. "Then they can re-assign it periodically to see how their students are growing and changing through our robust data comparison options." Questions in Reading mindset Snapshot can be read-aloud and are available in six languages: Arabic, Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
6. Student tools
To help students develop their reading skills and create meaningful reading experiences, ReadWorks provides students with a number of tools that facilitate interaction and boost comprehension. These tools include:
ReadWorks video tutorials
Classic Short Stories - Read a wide cross section of short stories written by famous authors.
CommonLit is a free service that helps teachers by providing thematic questions for a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction articles. Discussion questions deal with large themes like "how do we define the roles of men and women?" and "why do people follow the crowd?" The Book Pairings feature provides teachers with a collection of short articles to supplement the books that their students are reading. The articles and accompanying questions are intended to help students draw connections between the books they're reading and real life events and issues.
CommonLit 360 Curriculum for grades 6-10. Each unit covers a wide spectrum of ELA skills that includes reading, writing, discussion, vocabulary, and grammar. The texts are curated to include high-interest literature and timely themes. There are scaffolded lessons, supplemental texts, Spanish language texts, and optional materials for differentiation. Easy to use. There are grading and feedback tools, as well as Google Classroom integration. video * login at commonlit.org, tap Browse Content, and select the 360 Curriculum from the drop-down menu.
Circle Round, a storytelling podcast for children aged 4–10, tells carefully selected folktales from around the world with an eye toward inclusivity. The stories are adapted into 10- to 20-minute diverse episodes that delve into topics such as kindness, persistence, and generosity, while taking children to places they didn’t think possible.
Listenwise ( gr. 6 - 12) makes it easy to bring authentic voices and compelling non-fiction stories to the classroom. Teach your students to Listen with the Power of Public Radio. Curates the best of public radio to keep teaching connected to the real world and build student listening skills at the same time.
Where to Search for Free hard copy books
Silly Books gr. 1-3 Books, songs, comics and games animated and read aloud with accompanying text highlighted. Students can also publish their own stories. http://www.sillybooks.net/
Story Cove is a service that hosts audio and video stories based on the folktales from a variety of places and cultures. The stories are divided by their continent of origin. Each story is intended to convey a lesson on culture and society. The stories can be watched as videos or listened to as audio-only recordings.
Wootie Owl's Stories to Grow By : Stories are categorized by age groups and can be printed out. http://storiestogrowby.com
Dogo News
This is a great resource for current events for younger students. The site is crisp and the articles are written in for young readers. http://www.dogonews.com/
Aesop's Fables Online Collection A compilation of over 600 of the fables, with RealAudio encoding of some. http://www.aesopfables.com/
Aesop's Fables - Search through hundreds of Aesop's Fables, complete with audio narrations and classic images. FREE
Aesop's Fables interactive book from the Library of Congress. The book is available to read on the Web, on an iPad, and on an Android device. The book contains more than 140 of Aesop's Fables for children. The level of interactivity varies widely depending upon which story you're reading. Some of the stories have truly interactive animations while other simply have a small moving picture accompanying the fable.
The Aesop for Children Based on the 1919 book "The Aesop for Children: with Pictures by Milo Winters," these interactive stories are published by the Library of Congress. The original drawings "have been transformed for this interactive book, and now readers can interact with the charming illustrations to see and hear them move: a choosy heron eyes the fish swimming at his feet, a fox swishes his tail, a mouse chews a rope and frees a lion."
Aesop's Fables Although not as pretty or as well organized as some of the other sites, AesopFables.com does have the entire text of 655 of Aesop's fables and 127 fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen. Best click for students is Selected Fables which includes eighty-six Aesop fables "selected for their ease of reading and concise moral understanding." Look for the Real Audio logo in the lower right-hand corner of some of the story pages to hear Long's ten year old daughter read the fable.
The Color: Aesop's Fables This collection of seventeen Aesop's Fables coloring pages can be either colored online or printed on paper for old-fashioned coloring fun. Some of the fables represented are Goose with Gold Eggs, The Fox and the Ox, The Milkmaid and Her Pail, and the Ant and the Grasshopper. If you register for a free account, you'll be able to save your colored pictures, and might even see your masterpiece featured on The Color's homepage.
Fables from Aesop These four animated fables are based on Tom Lynch's "hand sewn patchwork tapestries inspired by the textile folk art of Africa, India and Peru." The four fables include The Tortoise and the Hare, A Lesson for a Foolish Crow, The Lion and the Mouse, and The Fox and His Shadow. Lynch's children's book of the same title includes thirteen of Aesop's fables, and was published in 2000 by Viking Children's Books.
University of Massachusetts: Aesop's Fables Each year, University of Massachusetts professor Copper Giloth asks her Computers in the Fine Arts students to illustrate or animate an Aesop fable, along with their own modern retelling of the story. This collection of nearly forty fables is the best of that student work dating back to 1994. This fun site is a must-see, and is a great place to start before creating your own fables. My personal favorite is The Jay and The Peacock.
Circle Round, a storytelling podcast for children aged 4–10, tells carefully selected folktales from around the world with an eye toward inclusivity. The stories are adapted into 10- to 20-minute diverse episodes that delve into topics such as kindness, persistence, and generosity, while taking children to places they didn’t think possible. Although they’re adaptations, the stories maintain the integrity of the culture they represent.
Fable Library: K-3. Humorous fables that you can download and read online. http://www.fablevision.com/place/library/index.html
Storybook Online: K-8. Large selection of collaborative stories that students can help write; completed collaborative stories; interactive stories and stories read aloud. http://www.storybookonline.net
The Literary Shed Find hundreds of ideas for using the visual resources of film, animation, photographs and picture books for teaching literacy. Each "shed" has a theme: The Mystery Shed, The Video Game Shed, The Fantasy Shed, The Myths Shed, The Picture Book Shed, and at least 25 more. Each "shed" has images and videos along with suggestions for using them. The activities and materials will appeal to many age groups from primary to college age. The Literacy shed is full of ideas for writing, creating, and improving your student's critical thinking skills. There are lesson plans with explicit instructions for writing.
StoryPlus Stories categorized by age groups. Some are free downloads. http://www.storyplus.com/Home.asp
Little Fingers : K-1 online stories. These is a little animation on some pages: http://www.lil-fingers.com/
Clifford Books on Line : The stories can be listened to read aloud. There is some interactivity including games that compliment the books. http://teacher.scholastic.com/clifford1/
Rebus Roundup http://www.highlightskids.com/Stories/Rebus/rebusRoundup_Top.asp
Story Place K-3 online stories with audio. In English and Spanish http://www.storyplace.org/storyplace.asp StoryPlace
‘StoryPlace came about to provide children with the virtual experience of going to the Library and participating in the same types of activities the Library offers at its physical locations. First launched in 2000, StoryPlace has been newly redesigned to present favorite stories and activities in a format compatible with desktop and mobile devices. The site also now includes early literacy information for parents and caregivers.’
Magic Blox ‘With a large and growing collection of eBooks for kids 1 to 13 years old, your children get to enjoy new books all the time from award winning authors and publishers from around the world. In addition to titles you are familiar with from traditional publishers, they also have the opportunity to discover new stories from authors they've never heard of, or try out new languages they've never seen.’
Bedtime Stories: K-6. Illustrated stories for reading online or printing out. Also contains downloadable interactive ebooks. Categories include:pet, humorous, and friendly monster stories. An author can submit their own books for online publication. http://www.bedtime-story.com/bedtime-story
Mother Goose Stories : Audio or text only options: http://www.ipl.org/div/kidspace/storyhour/goose/
Goodnight Stories: K-5. Stories to read, complete, fill in, and activities. http://goodnightstories.com/stories.htm
Inkless Tales - Listen to stories including Dolch words. (use the control + keys to enlarge the font size if students are following along) http://www.inklesstales.com/stories/index.shtml
BookPals: Actor Writers Guild members read stories through streamed video.http://www.bookpals.net/storyline/
This is True: Humorous stories taken from actual news reports: http://www.thisistrue.com/samples.html
Online Stories: K-3 stories that are all text based http://www.sundhagen.com/babbooks/
Tall Tales
The Global Campfire is a project of the Family Literacy Center. Readers imagine themselves gathered around a campfire where people from all over the world are telling their stories. Four types of stories are in process, one each in the genres of science fiction, adventure, mystery, and family relationships. Each story is the cumulative offerings of other readers, or "storytellers." After reading the contributions that make up a story, readers are encouraged to build on to the story by writing and submitting their own text and then checking back in a couple of days to see if it was included. http:www.indiana.edu/~eric_rec/fl/pcto/campfire.html
The Big Myth
Experience myths from cultures throughout the world with this impressive site that provides multimedia renditions of world creation stories. Each of the nine myths includes an overview of the culture that produced it, suggested class activities, and discussion questions. You'll need headphones for this one. Great site to add to a comparative study of world cultures. http://www.mythicjourneys.org/bigmyth/2_eng_myths.htm
Classical Comics From Shakespeare to Dickens to Shelley to Bronte .... Free to download . http://www.classicalcomics.com/index.html
Storyline Online: The Screen Actors Guild members read children's books aloud. Includes activities and lessons. http://www.storylineonline.net/
Storybee listen to professional storytellers from across the country as they spin their wonderful tales. Just click on your age group, and you’ll find a list of story titles. Click on any title, and the story will play. http://www.storybee.org/
Explore Stories Online Fun children's stories for kids of all ages. http://www.magickeys.com/books/
It's Story Time! An array of tales for story time. http://www.ipl.org/div/storyhour/
Andersen Fairy Tales Animated
http://www.andersenfairytales.com/
The animated Andersen Fairy Tales site is my storytelling pick of the day. It features three narrated fairy tales ("Real Princess," "Leaping Match" and "The Emperor's New Suit"), games, and a biography of Hans Christian Andersen. For more fairy tale fun, visit sister site Grimm Fairy Tales ( http://www.grimmfairytales.com/ ) which showcases "The Brementown Musicians" and "Faithful John."
Aesop's Fables "Aesop was a Greek storyteller born in approximately 620 BCE. Tradition says he was born as a slave, but developed a real talent for fables that were used to teach truths in a simple, understandable way. While Aesop was revered for his abilities, it is almost certain that many of the fables attributed to him were actually written by countless people over the ages." There are 258 fables here, categorized by subjects such as Birds, Horses, and Rabbits. Or, throw caution to the wind, and simply click on the Random Fable link.
Scholastic: Myths, Folktales, Fairy TalesAs part of their Writing with Writers series, this Scholastic project is a multi-grade resource for learning about and writing myths, folk tales and fairy tales. Grades one to three explore fairy tales and meet two authors who have re-written classic fairy tales: Jon Scieska (author of "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs") and Diane Good (author and illustrator of "Cinderella: The Dog and her Little Glass Slipper.") Similarly, grades three to six dive into folk tales while grades five through eight learn about myths. There even is an opportunity to submit your own tales for possible publication on the Scholastic site.
Unit On Folktales – Including Student Handouts gr 6--8
Storyberries: Fairy TalesStoryberries.com (since 2014) offers "both classic and contemporary stories in an easy-to-read format with vibrant illustrations." Each fairy tale page includes an audio version, a readable version, parental warnings if the story includes any violence, discussion ideas, and links to related stories.
SurLaLune Fairy TalesSurLaLune brings us "49 annotated fairy tales, including their histories, similar tales across cultures, modern interpretations and over 1,500 illustrations." Additionally, you can peruse electronic text from over 40 fairy tale anthologies. SurLaLune is not designed for preschoolers, but is an excellent resource for high-school students and curious grown-ups wanting to learn more about fairy tales and folklore.
University of Massachusetts: Aesop's FablesEach year, University of Massachusetts professor Copper Giloth asks her Computers in Fine Arts students to illustrate or animate an Aesop fable, along with their own modern retelling of the story. This collection of nearly forty fables is the best of that student work dating back to 1994. This fun site is a must-see, and is a great place to start before creating your own fables. My personal favorite is "The Jay and The Peacock."
Children Stories On-Line : Large resources of on-line children's stories http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html
Story Arts Online A resource with ideas and lessons for storytelling in the classroom http://www.storyarts.org/
Books Starring Characters of Color We Read Too is a free iOS app that allows users to tap into hundreds of books for youth in elementary through high school, starring characters of color written by authors of color. Users of the app can view the selections by title, author, or genre
BrainPop : Producer of educational animated movies for K-12. Original animated movies to explain concepts in a voice and visual style that is accessible, educational and entertaining for both children and adults. http://www.brainpop.com
Readworks.org high quality reading passages for students. This website offers a wide range of lesson plans, comprehension units, and reading passages organized by skill and Lexile level. Whether you’re looking for a fiction passage for a guided reading group or want to find a informational text when teaching test taking skills, Readworks.org may be a worthwhile resource
Starfall: K-2. Interactive phonics-based stories. http://www.starfall.com
Wonderopolis is a site for finding interesting articles to spark your students' imaginations. At its core Wonderopolis offers more than 2400 interesting articles for elementary school and middle school students. Each article covers a different topic that your students might wonder about. For example, today's article is Who Invented Friend Chicken? Every Wonderopolis article is accompanied by a short video and some corresponding images. All of the articles are also accompanied by a short reading comprehension quiz that can be printed or taken online. A vocabulary matching exercise also accompanies the articles on Wonderopolis. www.freetech4teachers.com
Create Stories for Children to Read with AI Pagemaster free. You give it a title and a one or two sentence description of your plot. Then it will almost immediately email you a short story, along with suggestions about how to use it.
Online Interactive stories - clever traditional and new stories http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/interactive/onlinestory.htm
ReadWorks is a free service that provides teachers with hundreds of lesson plans and more than two thousand reading non-fiction and fiction passages aligned to Common Core standards, and you can adjust the reading levels of text. It also includes poems and question sets. The collection is organized by grade level. In the collection you will find poems by Frost, Dickinson, Stevenson, and other notable poets.
Lexile scores are listed for each article along with grade levels and Common Core standards.
With a free ReadWorks account you can search for lessons and reading passages by grade level, lexile score, reading skill, subject area, and text type (fiction or non-fiction). In your ReadWorks account you can create digital binders of the lesson plans and reading passages that you want to use.
ReadWorks Review for Teachers and Students
Posted: 16 Jul 2022 07:45 PM PDT
ReadWorks is a learning website that helps students develop key reading comprehension skills. It offers a wide range of free K-12 reading materials and online assignments. ReadWorks resources can be used to supplement the reading practice done in class.
The purpose of Readworks is to provide students with quality reading materials that enable would them to develop reading skills that can work across different content areas. More specifically, these resources address three key areas: comprehension strategies, background knowledge, and vocabulary skills.
As a teacher, you can create classes in ReadWorks and invite students to join. Students can sign in with their own Google account using the generated class code you share with them or you can invite them using a roster. You can also organize students into different groups and differentiate instruction based on students needs.
ReadWorks offers several features to enhance reading instruction and learning. Some of these features include:
1. ReadWorks Article-A-Day
ReadWorks Article-A-Day helps students grow their background knowledge and develop their vocabulary skills through a daily reading routine of 10 to 15 minutes. Students select from the hand-curated text sets and read across various topics. A number of these sets include vocabulary practice activities to help with vocabulary building. There is also an integrated graphic organizer called Meaning Mapper which helps students build connections among vocabulary words.
To make the most out of this activity, students are recommended to read four or five articles each week and to keep this reading routine going for at least 15 or more weeks. "Article-A-Day allows for differentiation by making the selection and assigning of texts for different students easier, including ELLs, struggling readers, and students who need a challenge."
Teachers can also turn on ELL and Extra Support for Article-A-Day assignment allowing students to access a number of extra features including access to English audio versions of every text and the ability to provide directions for Article-A-Day and read aloud by a fluent reader in a pre-defined language.
2. ReadWorks Paired Texts
ReadWorks Paired texts are two articles on the same topic or theme. The purpose behind paired texts is to provide students with multiple perspectives on the topic thus prompting them to critically engage with texts by drawing connections and making inferences. Paired Texts come with various comprehension check questions that encourage students to make connections between the two texts.
Some paired texts include read-aloud option that teachers can turn on/off when assigning the set. When activated, paired texts are read aloud for students which is a great accessibility feature for students with special needs especially those that are low in vision. Teachers can turn on audio for the entire class, specific groups, or for individual students.
3. Audio and text-to-speech
All texts provided by ReadWorks include text-to-speech functionality enabling students to access and listen to audio versions of their reading materials. Also, a number of these texts offer human-voice audio option allowing students to hear texts read by fluent readers. Students can select their own playback speed and slow down or speed up as they like.
4. ReadWorks Student Library
The purpose behind ReadWorks Students Library is to foster independent reading by providing students with quality materials that they can read at their own pace without worrying about assessment. Students read for the joy of reading and learning. Student library is a feature included with the class setup.
As a teacher, you can allow students' access to the library where they can browse through a wide variety of nonfiction and fiction reading passages. "Students have access to all reading passages at their grade level as well as passages below their grade level and two grades higher. Each day, the library suggests new reading passages based on students' interests and passages they have enjoyed in the past. Teachers can see in Assignments & Progress how much their students have read and what they’ve enjoyed!"
5. Reading Mindset Snapshot
Reading Mindset Snapshot is a unique feature provided by ReadWorks. It allows teachers to know their students better as readers. Reading Mindset Snapshot consists of a number of questions focused on students feelings about reading and the topics that interest them. Students use emojis and thumbs up/down to answer these questions.
Image credit:Readworks.org
Teachers assign Reading Mindset Snapshot to their students preferably at the start of the school year. "Then they can re-assign it periodically to see how their students are growing and changing through our robust data comparison options." Questions in Reading mindset Snapshot can be read-aloud and are available in six languages: Arabic, Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
6. Student tools
To help students develop their reading skills and create meaningful reading experiences, ReadWorks provides students with a number of tools that facilitate interaction and boost comprehension. These tools include:
- Distraction free enables students to remove distracting features from their screen and expand the text focusing simply on the text and questions.
- Text magnification is a feature that is especially ideal for students with visual needs. It allows them to choose among three text enlargement options.
- Split screen allows students to "read and answer questions side-by-side. By clicking the split screen button, students can focus more on digging into the text and less on trying to remember what they read."
- Guided reading strip is another good feature that helps students track and focus on one line of text at a time. There is also the option to highlight and annotate text and add paragraph numbers for ease of reference and navigation.
- Students can also download their assignments and use ReadWorks offline mode to work on them without the need for Internet connection.
ReadWorks video tutorials
- ReadWorks Overview,
- Student Tools,
- Supporting All Learners ReadWorks’ Differentiation Tools,
- Importing a class in ReadWorks and creating an assignment for Google Classroom,
- Paired Texts for Educators,
- How to Use ReadWorks,
- Student Library for Educators,
- How to Do the Reading Mindset Snapshot,
Classic Short Stories - Read a wide cross section of short stories written by famous authors.
CommonLit is a free service that helps teachers by providing thematic questions for a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction articles. Discussion questions deal with large themes like "how do we define the roles of men and women?" and "why do people follow the crowd?" The Book Pairings feature provides teachers with a collection of short articles to supplement the books that their students are reading. The articles and accompanying questions are intended to help students draw connections between the books they're reading and real life events and issues.
CommonLit 360 Curriculum for grades 6-10. Each unit covers a wide spectrum of ELA skills that includes reading, writing, discussion, vocabulary, and grammar. The texts are curated to include high-interest literature and timely themes. There are scaffolded lessons, supplemental texts, Spanish language texts, and optional materials for differentiation. Easy to use. There are grading and feedback tools, as well as Google Classroom integration. video * login at commonlit.org, tap Browse Content, and select the 360 Curriculum from the drop-down menu.
Circle Round, a storytelling podcast for children aged 4–10, tells carefully selected folktales from around the world with an eye toward inclusivity. The stories are adapted into 10- to 20-minute diverse episodes that delve into topics such as kindness, persistence, and generosity, while taking children to places they didn’t think possible.
Listenwise ( gr. 6 - 12) makes it easy to bring authentic voices and compelling non-fiction stories to the classroom. Teach your students to Listen with the Power of Public Radio. Curates the best of public radio to keep teaching connected to the real world and build student listening skills at the same time.
Where to Search for Free hard copy books
Silly Books gr. 1-3 Books, songs, comics and games animated and read aloud with accompanying text highlighted. Students can also publish their own stories. http://www.sillybooks.net/
Story Cove is a service that hosts audio and video stories based on the folktales from a variety of places and cultures. The stories are divided by their continent of origin. Each story is intended to convey a lesson on culture and society. The stories can be watched as videos or listened to as audio-only recordings.
Wootie Owl's Stories to Grow By : Stories are categorized by age groups and can be printed out. http://storiestogrowby.com
Dogo News
This is a great resource for current events for younger students. The site is crisp and the articles are written in for young readers. http://www.dogonews.com/
Aesop's Fables Online Collection A compilation of over 600 of the fables, with RealAudio encoding of some. http://www.aesopfables.com/
Aesop's Fables - Search through hundreds of Aesop's Fables, complete with audio narrations and classic images. FREE
Aesop's Fables interactive book from the Library of Congress. The book is available to read on the Web, on an iPad, and on an Android device. The book contains more than 140 of Aesop's Fables for children. The level of interactivity varies widely depending upon which story you're reading. Some of the stories have truly interactive animations while other simply have a small moving picture accompanying the fable.
The Aesop for Children Based on the 1919 book "The Aesop for Children: with Pictures by Milo Winters," these interactive stories are published by the Library of Congress. The original drawings "have been transformed for this interactive book, and now readers can interact with the charming illustrations to see and hear them move: a choosy heron eyes the fish swimming at his feet, a fox swishes his tail, a mouse chews a rope and frees a lion."
Aesop's Fables Although not as pretty or as well organized as some of the other sites, AesopFables.com does have the entire text of 655 of Aesop's fables and 127 fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen. Best click for students is Selected Fables which includes eighty-six Aesop fables "selected for their ease of reading and concise moral understanding." Look for the Real Audio logo in the lower right-hand corner of some of the story pages to hear Long's ten year old daughter read the fable.
The Color: Aesop's Fables This collection of seventeen Aesop's Fables coloring pages can be either colored online or printed on paper for old-fashioned coloring fun. Some of the fables represented are Goose with Gold Eggs, The Fox and the Ox, The Milkmaid and Her Pail, and the Ant and the Grasshopper. If you register for a free account, you'll be able to save your colored pictures, and might even see your masterpiece featured on The Color's homepage.
Fables from Aesop These four animated fables are based on Tom Lynch's "hand sewn patchwork tapestries inspired by the textile folk art of Africa, India and Peru." The four fables include The Tortoise and the Hare, A Lesson for a Foolish Crow, The Lion and the Mouse, and The Fox and His Shadow. Lynch's children's book of the same title includes thirteen of Aesop's fables, and was published in 2000 by Viking Children's Books.
University of Massachusetts: Aesop's Fables Each year, University of Massachusetts professor Copper Giloth asks her Computers in the Fine Arts students to illustrate or animate an Aesop fable, along with their own modern retelling of the story. This collection of nearly forty fables is the best of that student work dating back to 1994. This fun site is a must-see, and is a great place to start before creating your own fables. My personal favorite is The Jay and The Peacock.
Circle Round, a storytelling podcast for children aged 4–10, tells carefully selected folktales from around the world with an eye toward inclusivity. The stories are adapted into 10- to 20-minute diverse episodes that delve into topics such as kindness, persistence, and generosity, while taking children to places they didn’t think possible. Although they’re adaptations, the stories maintain the integrity of the culture they represent.
Fable Library: K-3. Humorous fables that you can download and read online. http://www.fablevision.com/place/library/index.html
- Aesop's Fables: K- 8. Traditional and modern fables illustrator by art students. http://www.umass.edu/aesop/index.html
- Aesop's Fables--The Moral of the Story These classic tales each represent a moral dilemma along with a representation of the consequences which can come from one's actions. http://www.aesopfables.com/aesopsel.html
- Classic Fables Links to Aesop's Fable stories, includes imagery.http://www.umass.edu/aesop/fables.php
- Animated Fables Aesop's Fables in animated form. http://www.childclassics.com/
- Fables: A-Z Some of the most well-known Fables arranged in alphabetical order. http://www.storyarts.org/library/aesops/index.html
- Fables and Activities An index of fables and related activities, along with a glossary. http://www.mcwdn.org/fables/aesop.html
- Illustrated Fables Aesop's classic fables with imaginative illustrations. http://www.kids-pages.com/folders/stories/Aesops_Fables/page1.htm
Storybook Online: K-8. Large selection of collaborative stories that students can help write; completed collaborative stories; interactive stories and stories read aloud. http://www.storybookonline.net
The Literary Shed Find hundreds of ideas for using the visual resources of film, animation, photographs and picture books for teaching literacy. Each "shed" has a theme: The Mystery Shed, The Video Game Shed, The Fantasy Shed, The Myths Shed, The Picture Book Shed, and at least 25 more. Each "shed" has images and videos along with suggestions for using them. The activities and materials will appeal to many age groups from primary to college age. The Literacy shed is full of ideas for writing, creating, and improving your student's critical thinking skills. There are lesson plans with explicit instructions for writing.
StoryPlus Stories categorized by age groups. Some are free downloads. http://www.storyplus.com/Home.asp
Little Fingers : K-1 online stories. These is a little animation on some pages: http://www.lil-fingers.com/
Clifford Books on Line : The stories can be listened to read aloud. There is some interactivity including games that compliment the books. http://teacher.scholastic.com/clifford1/
Rebus Roundup http://www.highlightskids.com/Stories/Rebus/rebusRoundup_Top.asp
Story Place K-3 online stories with audio. In English and Spanish http://www.storyplace.org/storyplace.asp StoryPlace
‘StoryPlace came about to provide children with the virtual experience of going to the Library and participating in the same types of activities the Library offers at its physical locations. First launched in 2000, StoryPlace has been newly redesigned to present favorite stories and activities in a format compatible with desktop and mobile devices. The site also now includes early literacy information for parents and caregivers.’
Magic Blox ‘With a large and growing collection of eBooks for kids 1 to 13 years old, your children get to enjoy new books all the time from award winning authors and publishers from around the world. In addition to titles you are familiar with from traditional publishers, they also have the opportunity to discover new stories from authors they've never heard of, or try out new languages they've never seen.’
Bedtime Stories: K-6. Illustrated stories for reading online or printing out. Also contains downloadable interactive ebooks. Categories include:pet, humorous, and friendly monster stories. An author can submit their own books for online publication. http://www.bedtime-story.com/bedtime-story
Mother Goose Stories : Audio or text only options: http://www.ipl.org/div/kidspace/storyhour/goose/
Goodnight Stories: K-5. Stories to read, complete, fill in, and activities. http://goodnightstories.com/stories.htm
Inkless Tales - Listen to stories including Dolch words. (use the control + keys to enlarge the font size if students are following along) http://www.inklesstales.com/stories/index.shtml
BookPals: Actor Writers Guild members read stories through streamed video.http://www.bookpals.net/storyline/
This is True: Humorous stories taken from actual news reports: http://www.thisistrue.com/samples.html
Online Stories: K-3 stories that are all text based http://www.sundhagen.com/babbooks/
Tall Tales
- Tall Tales This page features links to many different tall tales including stories about Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. http://42explore.com/talltale.htm
- Favored Tales Stories of Davy Crockett, John Henry, Pecos bill and other traditionally told tall tales. http://library.thinkquest.org/TQ0312323/
- Animated Tall Tales Tall tales told with animation and sound. http://www.animatedtalltales.com/?s=7add5b894cd97dec5d81f
- Tales in America Large list of American Folklore Tales. http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/tall-tales/
The Global Campfire is a project of the Family Literacy Center. Readers imagine themselves gathered around a campfire where people from all over the world are telling their stories. Four types of stories are in process, one each in the genres of science fiction, adventure, mystery, and family relationships. Each story is the cumulative offerings of other readers, or "storytellers." After reading the contributions that make up a story, readers are encouraged to build on to the story by writing and submitting their own text and then checking back in a couple of days to see if it was included. http:www.indiana.edu/~eric_rec/fl/pcto/campfire.html
The Big Myth
Experience myths from cultures throughout the world with this impressive site that provides multimedia renditions of world creation stories. Each of the nine myths includes an overview of the culture that produced it, suggested class activities, and discussion questions. You'll need headphones for this one. Great site to add to a comparative study of world cultures. http://www.mythicjourneys.org/bigmyth/2_eng_myths.htm
Classical Comics From Shakespeare to Dickens to Shelley to Bronte .... Free to download . http://www.classicalcomics.com/index.html
Storyline Online: The Screen Actors Guild members read children's books aloud. Includes activities and lessons. http://www.storylineonline.net/
Storybee listen to professional storytellers from across the country as they spin their wonderful tales. Just click on your age group, and you’ll find a list of story titles. Click on any title, and the story will play. http://www.storybee.org/
Explore Stories Online Fun children's stories for kids of all ages. http://www.magickeys.com/books/
It's Story Time! An array of tales for story time. http://www.ipl.org/div/storyhour/
Andersen Fairy Tales Animated
http://www.andersenfairytales.com/
The animated Andersen Fairy Tales site is my storytelling pick of the day. It features three narrated fairy tales ("Real Princess," "Leaping Match" and "The Emperor's New Suit"), games, and a biography of Hans Christian Andersen. For more fairy tale fun, visit sister site Grimm Fairy Tales ( http://www.grimmfairytales.com/ ) which showcases "The Brementown Musicians" and "Faithful John."
- Time Treasured Tales National Geographic presents an interactive site where the child chooses the path that the story takes. After the choices are made, the real story is told. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/grimm/main.html
- Fairy Tale Collection A large collection of timeless tales. http://fairytales4u.com/idx00.htm
- Fairy Tales From Around the World Stories from hand Christian Anderson, Mark Twain, The Brothers Grimm and More. http://www.fairytalescollection.com/Hans_Christian_Anderson/Index.htm
- Listen to Fairy Tales Famous fairy tales presented in audio format. http://storynory.com/archives/fairy-tales
Aesop's Fables "Aesop was a Greek storyteller born in approximately 620 BCE. Tradition says he was born as a slave, but developed a real talent for fables that were used to teach truths in a simple, understandable way. While Aesop was revered for his abilities, it is almost certain that many of the fables attributed to him were actually written by countless people over the ages." There are 258 fables here, categorized by subjects such as Birds, Horses, and Rabbits. Or, throw caution to the wind, and simply click on the Random Fable link.
Scholastic: Myths, Folktales, Fairy TalesAs part of their Writing with Writers series, this Scholastic project is a multi-grade resource for learning about and writing myths, folk tales and fairy tales. Grades one to three explore fairy tales and meet two authors who have re-written classic fairy tales: Jon Scieska (author of "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs") and Diane Good (author and illustrator of "Cinderella: The Dog and her Little Glass Slipper.") Similarly, grades three to six dive into folk tales while grades five through eight learn about myths. There even is an opportunity to submit your own tales for possible publication on the Scholastic site.
Unit On Folktales – Including Student Handouts gr 6--8
Storyberries: Fairy TalesStoryberries.com (since 2014) offers "both classic and contemporary stories in an easy-to-read format with vibrant illustrations." Each fairy tale page includes an audio version, a readable version, parental warnings if the story includes any violence, discussion ideas, and links to related stories.
SurLaLune Fairy TalesSurLaLune brings us "49 annotated fairy tales, including their histories, similar tales across cultures, modern interpretations and over 1,500 illustrations." Additionally, you can peruse electronic text from over 40 fairy tale anthologies. SurLaLune is not designed for preschoolers, but is an excellent resource for high-school students and curious grown-ups wanting to learn more about fairy tales and folklore.
University of Massachusetts: Aesop's FablesEach year, University of Massachusetts professor Copper Giloth asks her Computers in Fine Arts students to illustrate or animate an Aesop fable, along with their own modern retelling of the story. This collection of nearly forty fables is the best of that student work dating back to 1994. This fun site is a must-see, and is a great place to start before creating your own fables. My personal favorite is "The Jay and The Peacock."
Children Stories On-Line : Large resources of on-line children's stories http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html
Story Arts Online A resource with ideas and lessons for storytelling in the classroom http://www.storyarts.org/
Books Starring Characters of Color We Read Too is a free iOS app that allows users to tap into hundreds of books for youth in elementary through high school, starring characters of color written by authors of color. Users of the app can view the selections by title, author, or genre
BrainPop : Producer of educational animated movies for K-12. Original animated movies to explain concepts in a voice and visual style that is accessible, educational and entertaining for both children and adults. http://www.brainpop.com
Readworks.org high quality reading passages for students. This website offers a wide range of lesson plans, comprehension units, and reading passages organized by skill and Lexile level. Whether you’re looking for a fiction passage for a guided reading group or want to find a informational text when teaching test taking skills, Readworks.org may be a worthwhile resource
Reading Tools
Same Text Written at Different Levels
Google Practice Sets "With practice sets, in Google Classroom, educators are able to use content they already have, or come up with brand new questions from scratch, to build an assessment activity. Google's artificial intelligence then scans the questions and determines the learning skills being addressed, and finds helpful hints and resources to go along with each question in case the students need assistance".Introduction video | Details
Verbal Workout https://www.verbalworkout.com/ Free website with interactive exercises for commonly taught MS and HS books.
WORD Force: A Literacy Adventure include fun, free, early literacy reading games for Kindergarten, first and second grade
Reading Treks offers educators a Google Maps file and a PDF instructional strategy handout to go with a book. The goal is for educators to be able to provide students with “a virtual field trip of resources about a piece of literature or text using the My Maps feature of Google Maps.” You can search by keyword and also input a low and high grade level for your sear
Awesome Talkster: K-12. By adding a Natural Voice to Web pages, children and teens can learn to pronounce words as they read them. The Awesome Talking Library, includes an animated character, providing synchronized highlighting so that children can follow along even more easily . http://www.awesomelibrary.org/Awesome_Talking_Library.html
Verbal Workout Free website with interactive exercises for commonly taught MS and HS books.Before reading the book, browse the quiz words with typical sentences to get familiar with unknown words. Then take the pre-reading quiz to increase word awareness and improve comprehension. After reading the book, browse the quiz words with book sentences. Then take the post-reading quiz based on example sentences from the book. The sentences are in story order, so this reinforces both the story and the words already learned.
Make Your Students Smarter With This Summarizing Strategy
Readlee Free online tool that has students read aloud to the computer, and then generates a report for you on the student's reading progress. The basic concept of Readlee is your students complete assignments by reading to their computers then Readlee uses artificial intelligence to provide you and your students with feedback on their reading. Readlee also has a Free Read option. This means that instead of you having to assign something to students to read, they pick what they want to read. When students use the Free Read option they can read anything from an article they've found online to a passage from Adventure According to Humphrey or a classic work like The Grapes of Wrath. The Free Read option still provides you and your students with information about how many words were read, time spent reading, reading speed, and unique words read. Streaks feature keeps track of how many days in a row a student has done any reading in Readlee. Watch the video for an overview of the new Readlee features. Watch the video embedded below of a complete overview of how Readlee works from a teacher's perspective and from a student's perspective. www.freetec4teachers.com
SplashLearn - More Than Just Fun Math and ELA Practice K-5 At its core SplashLearn is a service that provides a free and ad-free environment in which students can review and practice their math and ELA skills. Students can use it in the web browsers on their computers or use the free SplashLearn mobile apps. The way that students access the SplashLearn games and other activities is through your free classroom account. Students then access SplashLearn by going to the link that you give them and then tap their avatars followed by the image that represents the class password. Alternatively, students can open SplashLearn then select "student" and enter the class code. Because your students access SplashLearn through the classroom account that you create, you can see their progress in your teacher dashboard. It's in your teacher dashboard that you can find standards-aligned math and ELA activities to assign to your students. Activities can be assigned to the whole class or to individual students within your class.The value of SplashLearn is found in the teacher dashboard. Specifically, the way in which you can find activities and assign them to your students as needed is where SplashLearn becomes valuable. Through that dashboard you can quickly find activities to help your students practice and strengthen their skills while also monitoring their progress. www.freetech4teachers.com
The Best Places To Get The “Same” Text Written For Different “Levels”
“Enter The Story” Tool For Introducing Classic Books Via “Choose Your Own Adventure”
Digital Lit Circles: A Process and Templates for Any LMS By Jennifer Rushing Explore a process that can be adapted for any grade and used in any LMS!
Read Theory‘Accompany your students on a journey through a vast library of reading comprehension content. ReadTheory's adaptive approach fosters improvement by automatically meeting learners at their own, individual ability levels. Signup takes seconds and no time is spent vetting assignments. Progress is shown on an intuitive report, replete with actionable, meaningful insights. Read Theory program is completely free.’
Choose Your Own Adventure Stories & A Bunch Of Ways To Create Them
Talk To Books You type a question or a statement into the search bar (obviously, it’s Google!) and in return, you’ll get quotes from inside of books that seemingly answer your questions or pertain to your sentence.
Summary tool for basic content? Somebody Wanted But So and Then.Diverse BookFinder is a huge collection of kids trade picture books featuring black and indigenous people and people of colour (PIPOC). Diverse BookFinder collects 'all depictions of BIPOC characters in trade picture books published since 20002. Anyone can check these books out at any time through interlibrary loan'. Diverse BookFinder offers an integrated search tool that enables users to easily search for and locate children's' picture books featuring BIPOC characters. Additionally, the site provides 'real-time data on who (which BIPOC characters) is depicted in trade picture books, and how (what messages these stories send), to enable deeper conversation and change.'
Read&Write for Google The free Chrome extension provides a range of tools to support students with both reading and writing on the web. This extension allows users to have words, passages, or whole documents and web pages read aloud, providing support for English learners. In addition, students have the ability to highlight text in multiple colors, see word meanings explained with both text and pictures, turn words into text as they speak, and hear text translated into other languages.
The Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers
Reading EggsReading Eggs offers self-paced and easy to follow reading games, lessons and activities .To keep students motivated, lessons includes animations, songs, fun characters, and rewards.There are also over 3000 online books for kids each of which includes comprehension check questions. Also, Reading Eggs provides parents with access to 'detailed progress reports as well as hundreds of full-colour downloadable activity sheets that correspond with the lessons in the program.'
Reading Bear
Reading Bear provides educational resources to help kids learn to read. These include over 50 presentations covering numerous topics including phonics principles and over 1000 vocabulary items. Here is how Reading Bear works:
Reading Vine. “Rather than a one size fits all curriculum, Reading Vine offers supplemental reading practice that can be personalized to fit a student’s or group’s exact needs. Teachers, parents, and tutors simply choose appropriate passage text/questions as desired, and then save, download, or print it out and share with the students.” The site has reading sets and reading passages for grades K-12 and for Lexile ranges from 0 to 1300+. All of it is searchable by skill set, age, word count, Lexile, genre, and topic. The teacher has to register to use the site, but there is no other charge for its use.
Readlee - Know How Your Students Read Online Assignments www.freetec4teachers.com
Disrupt Texts is a crowdsourced, grass roots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve.
Into the Book is a reading comprehension resource for elementary students and teachers. We focus on eight research-based strategies: Using Prior Knowledge, Making Connections, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Summarizing, Evaluating and Synthesizing. Try the online interactive activities, or click below to find out how to get our engaging 15-minute video programs.
Link to Text is a Chrome extension provided by Google. You can highlight a text on a web page and then create a link that you can share. When someone clicks on your link, they go to the website AND the text that you had highlighted will be highlighted for them. This is an awesome tool if you are trying to differentiate within a Google Doc or HyperDoc, but want to keep the main document simple. You can now link out to more specific information that is already highlighted for your students.
Edji provides teachers a means to have students read and analyze text, images or PDFs. The students are able to interact with their medium by highlighting text or adding tags to the images or PDFs. Their interactions can be text comments, emojis, or audio recordings. The teacher can also add open-ended questions to the activity. Initially, the students are only seeing their interactions with the medium. Then the true power of Edji comes to light, ‘Heat Vision’. This feature allows the teacher to activate all interactions as visible to all students. Replying to interactions is also a feature which the teacher can decide to activate. Teacher tools tutorial | Groups tutorial
Talk to Books is a new way to find answers to a range of topics online. Students simply type a question into Talk to Books and theAI-powered tool will scan every sentence in more than 100,000 volumes in Google Books and generate a list of likely responses with the pertinent passage in bold.
Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning In this article, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey offer instructional ideas to help your students build speaking and listening skills. Suggestions include reader’s theater, listening stations, presentations, and reciprocal teaching. Technology offers new ways to engage students in speaking and listening tasks — try digital storytelling or a listening gallery walk. There should be a hum of learning in your class, with many voices engaged in discussions about the topics under investigation! Comprehension Strategy: Jigsaw
With this cooperative learning strategy, each student has a chance to become the expert in a topic and share their knowledge. Go inside Cathy Doyle's second grade classroom in Evanston, Illinois to observe her students use the jigsaw strategy to understand the topic of gardening more deeply and share what they have learned.
1,001 Novels: A Library of America is an ESRI story map developed by Susan Straight. The story map features short reviews of 1,000 American novels. Each novel is geolocated on a map of the United States. The story map is divided into geographic regions. You can also view the entire map at once. www.freetech4teachers.com
Create Your Own Rebus Activities Solving a rebus puzzle can be a great learning activity for students of any age. Because it uses non-linguistic representation of familiar things, it is one of the high-effect-size strategies. And it can help with spelling and vocabulary skills as well. You can create your own rebus at this free website. The site will let you choose between using their own images or emoji characters. You can also turn on the ability for hints about some of the drawings to be shown.
Kids Discover Online offers excellent reference articles for elementary school and middle school students. All of the articles are offered in multiple versions to match a range of Lexile scores. But that is not all that Kids Discover Online offers. A nice feature of Kids Discover Online is the concept maps that students can explore. These concept maps, called Discover Maps, allow students to see the connections between topics in social studies, science, and mathematics. video
Optimize Web Pages for Easier Reading Chrome Extensions
Philosopher’s Toolkit, which has a variety of free lesson plans that can be used to lead philosophical discussions among pre-college students. Clicking on one of the Philosophy Tools leads to a set of lessons on that particular topic. Some are subject-area specific (History, Languages & Literature, Math, Science, Social Studies), whereas others are more general (Philosophy, Art & Aesthetics, Film). Each lesson plan indicates the grade level for which it is appropriate.
I Lazy to Read is a web application that auto-summarizes any online post into few sentences (five sentences). We have been experimenting with it for sometime now and found it really helpful. In sample tests the auto-generated summaries are highly relevant and are proved to capture the main ideas of the article. I Lazy to Read, as its name indicate, is a great help particularly in those times when you are too busy to read a whole article or a report just to find out that it is not relevant. You can also use it to save time reading news reports, blog posts and many more.
Knewton.The company believes its new, free online tutoring platform will radically transform how teachers personalize instruction. Knewton claims to offer automated, digital tutoring that responds to each student's needs. "We can take the combined data power of millions of students — all the people who are just like you — [who] had to learn a particular concept before, that you have to learn today — to find the best pieces of content, proven most effective for people just like you, and give that to you every single time," he says. Here's how it works: The platform presents video and a variety of written content and then asks multiple-choice questions. Based on student responses, and patterns of responses from other, similar students, the next piece of content is served up.
Knewton currently offers programs in math, biology and English language arts, mostly for middle school and high school grades. The company plans to expand soon with history and other curricula.
LitCharts features background information on a book's author, a color-coded list of themes in the book, a plot summary, a character list and summary, and a theme-tracker. The theme-tracker helps students keep track of literary themes with examples throughout a book.
Tool for Helping Students with Reading and Writing Difficulties
Common Lit - It is the mission of Common Lit to provide a collection of high quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades five through twelve. You will find this site filled with leveled fiction and nonfiction articles that are flexible, research based, and aligned to standards. The resources are created for teachers, by teachers. The site has won awards from IMA, Harvard Graduate School of Education
News-O-Matic offers children gr7 to 11 their first DAILY newspaper! It produces five news stories each day, covering the latest in world news, science, sports, as well as the wacky stories. With News-O-Matic, readers will also have access to amazing history timelines, fun news games, interactive maps, and countless other features. Readers will be able to rate the articles, ask questions, and even submit drawings that relate to the news. Ways to use in the classroom.
Freckle It’s an “adaptive” platform where teachers can set up free virtual classrooms (it looks like it’s free to individual teachers, but schools and districts can pay for more features) and is supposed to differentiate in English, Math and Social Studies content. "Freckle empowers teachers to differentiate instruction across Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science."
Literator is pre-programmed with 2000 skills and prompts, you simply enter a student’s level and you will be able to see the relevant skills. Students are automatically grouped into small groups based on the skills they are struggling with which makes it easy for teachers to plan future interventions. All data gleaned from students' reading and literacy activities is logged in real time and teachers can easily access and view it with a single tap. Based on this saved data, Literator predicts potential student performance so ‘you can plan interventions before it’s too late’.
Jellybean Scoop is a service that features fun and interesting news stories on four reading levels. Along with each story you will find comprehension questions and vocabulary lists. Larry Ferlazzo wrote a review of the articles and activities here.
NEWSELA gr K-12
emphasis on nonfiction reading,provides daily current events articles written specifically for K–12 students. Each day the site adds three new articles to the collection. Categories include War & Peace, Science, Kids, Money, Law, Health and Arts. For every article, there are versions written at different levels. With just a few clicks, a teacher can provide the same story leveled for students of differing reading ability Also- Newsela iPad app
Adolescent Literacy AdLit.org is a national multimedia project offering information and resources to the parents and educators of struggling adolescent readers and writers.
Listen and Read is a set of 15 nonfiction read-along stories. The stories feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into three categories: Community Club which would be better described as "careers," animals, and the President.
Elementary Literacy with iPad - Free iBook
Learn how other teachers have taught literacy with iPad, and how you can integrate a variety of content for iPad into your own literacy classrooms. You'll find examples of literacy lessons that can complement your instruction and help you understand how to use different types of content for iPad together. And you'll explore curated literacy collections to help you discover apps, books, and iTunes U materials to build your own literacy lessons.
ReadWorks is a free service that provides teachers with hundreds of lesson plans and more than two thousand reading non-fiction and fiction passages aligned to Common Core standards. It also includes poems and question sets. The collection is organized by grade level. In the collection you will find poems by Frost, Dickinson, Stevenson, and other notable poets.
Lexile scores are listed for each article along with grade levels and Common Core standards.
With a free ReadWorks account you can search for lessons and reading passages by grade level, lexile score, reading skill, subject area, and text type (fiction or non-fiction). In your ReadWorks account you can create digital binders of the lesson plans and reading passages that you want to use.
ThinkCERCA offers CCSS-aligned lessons that promote close reading and argumentative writing for Language Arts, Social Studies and Science classes for grades 4 - 12. Some of these close reading lessons and corresponding student performance tracking tools are available for free.
Choosito is a search engine that offers a reading level index for its search results. When you search on Choosito you can select to refine results to reading levels marked as Early Readers, Emerging Readers, Fluent Readers, or Advanced Readers. In addition to reading level refinement Choosito offers an option to sort results by subject area.
News Evaluator website is a new interactive designed to help students develop information literacy skills.
Tribune by Smithsonian - Educational resources for all levels. Click on the appropriate grade level ban at the top and you will find a wide range of education content that is leveled for reading from the Smithsonian. You will be joining more than 200,000 registered teachers who are already putting these free Smithsonian Teacher resources to use in their classrooms. You will find that the site contains twice-daily AP news articles, Lexile® levels for K-12, self-scoring quizzes customized by Lexile® level, critical thinking questions, student commenting, Espanol AP articles, weekly lesson plans, weekly video, and even a weekend "Monday Morning Ready" newsletter as prep for the week ahead
Connect Plugged-In Students to Classic Literature A recent trend in online storytelling may offer opportunities for teachers looking to help connect students to literature. The Literary YouTube series seeks to transform classic works into video blogs set in the modern day. One of the earliest such series is also one of the most popular: The Lizzie Benet Diaries, an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. In this modernized version of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet is a 24-year-old grad student with a video blog, and the Bennet sisters—reduced to three rather than the original five—are just as concerned about jobs and school as they are about marriage. Frankenstein, MD, which teaches viewers about biology while following the exploits of Victoria Frankenstein, a medical student struggling to make a name for herself in a male-dominated field.
Click Here to Access Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Click Here to Access Frankenstein, MD
Click Here to Access Classic Alice
Click Here to Access The New Adventures of Peter and Wendy
Click Here to Access The March Family Letters
Graphing Stories is a new website that was developed by Dan Meyer and Buzz Math. Graphing Stories features 24 short videos that tell a story that students can graph to tell the mathematical story happening in the video. I recommend reading this post by Dan Meyer to get a full sense of how this works and where the idea came from. All of the graphing stories videos can be downloaded to use in your classroom. Graphing Stories even provides the graph paper for your students to graph the stories.
My Study Bar - a comprehensive set of portable open source and freeware applications to support learners with literacy difficulties. MyStudyBar is similar to popular commercial programs which use a floating toolbar to support literacy. The main difference is MyStudyBar is free. The toolbar includes a range of tools to support inclusion such as mind mapping, screen masking, word prediction, talking dictionary, text-to-speech, Save as MP3 and voice recognition. PC Only. (Speech recognition only works in Vista or Windows 7) http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eduapps/mystudybar.php
Nuskool This is a site that uses pop culture as teaching moments for students. Tailored to grades 6th-12th students learn a variety of subjects such as: Math, Science, English, etc through educational lessons based on the different elements of pop culture (video games, sports, films, etc.).
Textivate site for getting interactive activities based on text This works by copying and pasting text (up to 500) and then clicking a button. Then a wide variety of activities such as: fill in the blank, separate the words, tiles, and more can be chosen.
LitMap Project is a free community-powered site for locating books according to their geographic settings. Visit the homepage and click on the map to find books about any of the pinned locations on the map.
CAST eReader (PC & Mac) $10 http://www.ereader.com/product/browse/software
Natural Voice Reader (PC freeware) http://www.naturalreaders.com/
Read Please reads any text on a screen. http://www.readplease.com/
Word Talk reads text in a Word document http://www.wordtalk.org.uk/
Awesome Highlighter
By placing it on your FireFox toolbar, it highlights key notes in web pages, extract notes, create a short url, share or save. Awesome Highlighter can be used as a web note taking or reading comprehension tool. http://www.awesomehighlighter.com/
Rewordify is a free site that was developed by a special education teacher and former computer programmer for the purpose of helping students read complex passages. At its most basic level Rewordify takes a complex passage and rephrases it in simpler terms.video
Readability Scrubs web pages of distractions and provides a clean, comfortable view. Handy for reading longer articles. https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets
Same Text Written at Different Levels
Google Practice Sets "With practice sets, in Google Classroom, educators are able to use content they already have, or come up with brand new questions from scratch, to build an assessment activity. Google's artificial intelligence then scans the questions and determines the learning skills being addressed, and finds helpful hints and resources to go along with each question in case the students need assistance".Introduction video | Details
Verbal Workout https://www.verbalworkout.com/ Free website with interactive exercises for commonly taught MS and HS books.
WORD Force: A Literacy Adventure include fun, free, early literacy reading games for Kindergarten, first and second grade
Reading Treks offers educators a Google Maps file and a PDF instructional strategy handout to go with a book. The goal is for educators to be able to provide students with “a virtual field trip of resources about a piece of literature or text using the My Maps feature of Google Maps.” You can search by keyword and also input a low and high grade level for your sear
Awesome Talkster: K-12. By adding a Natural Voice to Web pages, children and teens can learn to pronounce words as they read them. The Awesome Talking Library, includes an animated character, providing synchronized highlighting so that children can follow along even more easily . http://www.awesomelibrary.org/Awesome_Talking_Library.html
Verbal Workout Free website with interactive exercises for commonly taught MS and HS books.Before reading the book, browse the quiz words with typical sentences to get familiar with unknown words. Then take the pre-reading quiz to increase word awareness and improve comprehension. After reading the book, browse the quiz words with book sentences. Then take the post-reading quiz based on example sentences from the book. The sentences are in story order, so this reinforces both the story and the words already learned.
Make Your Students Smarter With This Summarizing Strategy
Readlee Free online tool that has students read aloud to the computer, and then generates a report for you on the student's reading progress. The basic concept of Readlee is your students complete assignments by reading to their computers then Readlee uses artificial intelligence to provide you and your students with feedback on their reading. Readlee also has a Free Read option. This means that instead of you having to assign something to students to read, they pick what they want to read. When students use the Free Read option they can read anything from an article they've found online to a passage from Adventure According to Humphrey or a classic work like The Grapes of Wrath. The Free Read option still provides you and your students with information about how many words were read, time spent reading, reading speed, and unique words read. Streaks feature keeps track of how many days in a row a student has done any reading in Readlee. Watch the video for an overview of the new Readlee features. Watch the video embedded below of a complete overview of how Readlee works from a teacher's perspective and from a student's perspective. www.freetec4teachers.com
SplashLearn - More Than Just Fun Math and ELA Practice K-5 At its core SplashLearn is a service that provides a free and ad-free environment in which students can review and practice their math and ELA skills. Students can use it in the web browsers on their computers or use the free SplashLearn mobile apps. The way that students access the SplashLearn games and other activities is through your free classroom account. Students then access SplashLearn by going to the link that you give them and then tap their avatars followed by the image that represents the class password. Alternatively, students can open SplashLearn then select "student" and enter the class code. Because your students access SplashLearn through the classroom account that you create, you can see their progress in your teacher dashboard. It's in your teacher dashboard that you can find standards-aligned math and ELA activities to assign to your students. Activities can be assigned to the whole class or to individual students within your class.The value of SplashLearn is found in the teacher dashboard. Specifically, the way in which you can find activities and assign them to your students as needed is where SplashLearn becomes valuable. Through that dashboard you can quickly find activities to help your students practice and strengthen their skills while also monitoring their progress. www.freetech4teachers.com
The Best Places To Get The “Same” Text Written For Different “Levels”
“Enter The Story” Tool For Introducing Classic Books Via “Choose Your Own Adventure”
Digital Lit Circles: A Process and Templates for Any LMS By Jennifer Rushing Explore a process that can be adapted for any grade and used in any LMS!
Read Theory‘Accompany your students on a journey through a vast library of reading comprehension content. ReadTheory's adaptive approach fosters improvement by automatically meeting learners at their own, individual ability levels. Signup takes seconds and no time is spent vetting assignments. Progress is shown on an intuitive report, replete with actionable, meaningful insights. Read Theory program is completely free.’
Choose Your Own Adventure Stories & A Bunch Of Ways To Create Them
Talk To Books You type a question or a statement into the search bar (obviously, it’s Google!) and in return, you’ll get quotes from inside of books that seemingly answer your questions or pertain to your sentence.
Summary tool for basic content? Somebody Wanted But So and Then.Diverse BookFinder is a huge collection of kids trade picture books featuring black and indigenous people and people of colour (PIPOC). Diverse BookFinder collects 'all depictions of BIPOC characters in trade picture books published since 20002. Anyone can check these books out at any time through interlibrary loan'. Diverse BookFinder offers an integrated search tool that enables users to easily search for and locate children's' picture books featuring BIPOC characters. Additionally, the site provides 'real-time data on who (which BIPOC characters) is depicted in trade picture books, and how (what messages these stories send), to enable deeper conversation and change.'
Read&Write for Google The free Chrome extension provides a range of tools to support students with both reading and writing on the web. This extension allows users to have words, passages, or whole documents and web pages read aloud, providing support for English learners. In addition, students have the ability to highlight text in multiple colors, see word meanings explained with both text and pictures, turn words into text as they speak, and hear text translated into other languages.
The Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers
Reading EggsReading Eggs offers self-paced and easy to follow reading games, lessons and activities .To keep students motivated, lessons includes animations, songs, fun characters, and rewards.There are also over 3000 online books for kids each of which includes comprehension check questions. Also, Reading Eggs provides parents with access to 'detailed progress reports as well as hundreds of full-colour downloadable activity sheets that correspond with the lessons in the program.'
Reading Bear
Reading Bear provides educational resources to help kids learn to read. These include over 50 presentations covering numerous topics including phonics principles and over 1000 vocabulary items. Here is how Reading Bear works:
Reading Vine. “Rather than a one size fits all curriculum, Reading Vine offers supplemental reading practice that can be personalized to fit a student’s or group’s exact needs. Teachers, parents, and tutors simply choose appropriate passage text/questions as desired, and then save, download, or print it out and share with the students.” The site has reading sets and reading passages for grades K-12 and for Lexile ranges from 0 to 1300+. All of it is searchable by skill set, age, word count, Lexile, genre, and topic. The teacher has to register to use the site, but there is no other charge for its use.
Readlee - Know How Your Students Read Online Assignments www.freetec4teachers.com
Disrupt Texts is a crowdsourced, grass roots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve.
Into the Book is a reading comprehension resource for elementary students and teachers. We focus on eight research-based strategies: Using Prior Knowledge, Making Connections, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Summarizing, Evaluating and Synthesizing. Try the online interactive activities, or click below to find out how to get our engaging 15-minute video programs.
Link to Text is a Chrome extension provided by Google. You can highlight a text on a web page and then create a link that you can share. When someone clicks on your link, they go to the website AND the text that you had highlighted will be highlighted for them. This is an awesome tool if you are trying to differentiate within a Google Doc or HyperDoc, but want to keep the main document simple. You can now link out to more specific information that is already highlighted for your students.
Edji provides teachers a means to have students read and analyze text, images or PDFs. The students are able to interact with their medium by highlighting text or adding tags to the images or PDFs. Their interactions can be text comments, emojis, or audio recordings. The teacher can also add open-ended questions to the activity. Initially, the students are only seeing their interactions with the medium. Then the true power of Edji comes to light, ‘Heat Vision’. This feature allows the teacher to activate all interactions as visible to all students. Replying to interactions is also a feature which the teacher can decide to activate. Teacher tools tutorial | Groups tutorial
Talk to Books is a new way to find answers to a range of topics online. Students simply type a question into Talk to Books and theAI-powered tool will scan every sentence in more than 100,000 volumes in Google Books and generate a list of likely responses with the pertinent passage in bold.
Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning In this article, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey offer instructional ideas to help your students build speaking and listening skills. Suggestions include reader’s theater, listening stations, presentations, and reciprocal teaching. Technology offers new ways to engage students in speaking and listening tasks — try digital storytelling or a listening gallery walk. There should be a hum of learning in your class, with many voices engaged in discussions about the topics under investigation! Comprehension Strategy: Jigsaw
With this cooperative learning strategy, each student has a chance to become the expert in a topic and share their knowledge. Go inside Cathy Doyle's second grade classroom in Evanston, Illinois to observe her students use the jigsaw strategy to understand the topic of gardening more deeply and share what they have learned.
1,001 Novels: A Library of America is an ESRI story map developed by Susan Straight. The story map features short reviews of 1,000 American novels. Each novel is geolocated on a map of the United States. The story map is divided into geographic regions. You can also view the entire map at once. www.freetech4teachers.com
Create Your Own Rebus Activities Solving a rebus puzzle can be a great learning activity for students of any age. Because it uses non-linguistic representation of familiar things, it is one of the high-effect-size strategies. And it can help with spelling and vocabulary skills as well. You can create your own rebus at this free website. The site will let you choose between using their own images or emoji characters. You can also turn on the ability for hints about some of the drawings to be shown.
Kids Discover Online offers excellent reference articles for elementary school and middle school students. All of the articles are offered in multiple versions to match a range of Lexile scores. But that is not all that Kids Discover Online offers. A nice feature of Kids Discover Online is the concept maps that students can explore. These concept maps, called Discover Maps, allow students to see the connections between topics in social studies, science, and mathematics. video
Optimize Web Pages for Easier Reading Chrome Extensions
- EasyReader It allows you to turn long webpages into readable articles. Some of its features include: customize page color, size, and fonts; it provides table of content for headings, print selected content and many more.
- Mercury Reader It helps you remove distractive elements from any web page and turn it into a clean reading article. Some of its features include: remove ads and web page noise, toggle between light and dark themes, adjust text size and typeface, print optimized, share via social media websites.
- Midnight Lizard This extension changes page colors, brightness and contrast to increase readability and brings dark night mode to all websites.
- Just Read remove clutter from web pages. It helps you remove ads, comments, popups and ‘read the article in a customizable, simplified format - like a read mode but better! No login.
Philosopher’s Toolkit, which has a variety of free lesson plans that can be used to lead philosophical discussions among pre-college students. Clicking on one of the Philosophy Tools leads to a set of lessons on that particular topic. Some are subject-area specific (History, Languages & Literature, Math, Science, Social Studies), whereas others are more general (Philosophy, Art & Aesthetics, Film). Each lesson plan indicates the grade level for which it is appropriate.
I Lazy to Read is a web application that auto-summarizes any online post into few sentences (five sentences). We have been experimenting with it for sometime now and found it really helpful. In sample tests the auto-generated summaries are highly relevant and are proved to capture the main ideas of the article. I Lazy to Read, as its name indicate, is a great help particularly in those times when you are too busy to read a whole article or a report just to find out that it is not relevant. You can also use it to save time reading news reports, blog posts and many more.
Knewton.The company believes its new, free online tutoring platform will radically transform how teachers personalize instruction. Knewton claims to offer automated, digital tutoring that responds to each student's needs. "We can take the combined data power of millions of students — all the people who are just like you — [who] had to learn a particular concept before, that you have to learn today — to find the best pieces of content, proven most effective for people just like you, and give that to you every single time," he says. Here's how it works: The platform presents video and a variety of written content and then asks multiple-choice questions. Based on student responses, and patterns of responses from other, similar students, the next piece of content is served up.
Knewton currently offers programs in math, biology and English language arts, mostly for middle school and high school grades. The company plans to expand soon with history and other curricula.
LitCharts features background information on a book's author, a color-coded list of themes in the book, a plot summary, a character list and summary, and a theme-tracker. The theme-tracker helps students keep track of literary themes with examples throughout a book.
Tool for Helping Students with Reading and Writing Difficulties
Common Lit - It is the mission of Common Lit to provide a collection of high quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades five through twelve. You will find this site filled with leveled fiction and nonfiction articles that are flexible, research based, and aligned to standards. The resources are created for teachers, by teachers. The site has won awards from IMA, Harvard Graduate School of Education
News-O-Matic offers children gr7 to 11 their first DAILY newspaper! It produces five news stories each day, covering the latest in world news, science, sports, as well as the wacky stories. With News-O-Matic, readers will also have access to amazing history timelines, fun news games, interactive maps, and countless other features. Readers will be able to rate the articles, ask questions, and even submit drawings that relate to the news. Ways to use in the classroom.
Freckle It’s an “adaptive” platform where teachers can set up free virtual classrooms (it looks like it’s free to individual teachers, but schools and districts can pay for more features) and is supposed to differentiate in English, Math and Social Studies content. "Freckle empowers teachers to differentiate instruction across Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science."
Literator is pre-programmed with 2000 skills and prompts, you simply enter a student’s level and you will be able to see the relevant skills. Students are automatically grouped into small groups based on the skills they are struggling with which makes it easy for teachers to plan future interventions. All data gleaned from students' reading and literacy activities is logged in real time and teachers can easily access and view it with a single tap. Based on this saved data, Literator predicts potential student performance so ‘you can plan interventions before it’s too late’.
Jellybean Scoop is a service that features fun and interesting news stories on four reading levels. Along with each story you will find comprehension questions and vocabulary lists. Larry Ferlazzo wrote a review of the articles and activities here.
NEWSELA gr K-12
emphasis on nonfiction reading,provides daily current events articles written specifically for K–12 students. Each day the site adds three new articles to the collection. Categories include War & Peace, Science, Kids, Money, Law, Health and Arts. For every article, there are versions written at different levels. With just a few clicks, a teacher can provide the same story leveled for students of differing reading ability Also- Newsela iPad app
Adolescent Literacy AdLit.org is a national multimedia project offering information and resources to the parents and educators of struggling adolescent readers and writers.
Listen and Read is a set of 15 nonfiction read-along stories. The stories feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into three categories: Community Club which would be better described as "careers," animals, and the President.
Elementary Literacy with iPad - Free iBook
Learn how other teachers have taught literacy with iPad, and how you can integrate a variety of content for iPad into your own literacy classrooms. You'll find examples of literacy lessons that can complement your instruction and help you understand how to use different types of content for iPad together. And you'll explore curated literacy collections to help you discover apps, books, and iTunes U materials to build your own literacy lessons.
ReadWorks is a free service that provides teachers with hundreds of lesson plans and more than two thousand reading non-fiction and fiction passages aligned to Common Core standards. It also includes poems and question sets. The collection is organized by grade level. In the collection you will find poems by Frost, Dickinson, Stevenson, and other notable poets.
Lexile scores are listed for each article along with grade levels and Common Core standards.
With a free ReadWorks account you can search for lessons and reading passages by grade level, lexile score, reading skill, subject area, and text type (fiction or non-fiction). In your ReadWorks account you can create digital binders of the lesson plans and reading passages that you want to use.
ThinkCERCA offers CCSS-aligned lessons that promote close reading and argumentative writing for Language Arts, Social Studies and Science classes for grades 4 - 12. Some of these close reading lessons and corresponding student performance tracking tools are available for free.
Choosito is a search engine that offers a reading level index for its search results. When you search on Choosito you can select to refine results to reading levels marked as Early Readers, Emerging Readers, Fluent Readers, or Advanced Readers. In addition to reading level refinement Choosito offers an option to sort results by subject area.
News Evaluator website is a new interactive designed to help students develop information literacy skills.
Tribune by Smithsonian - Educational resources for all levels. Click on the appropriate grade level ban at the top and you will find a wide range of education content that is leveled for reading from the Smithsonian. You will be joining more than 200,000 registered teachers who are already putting these free Smithsonian Teacher resources to use in their classrooms. You will find that the site contains twice-daily AP news articles, Lexile® levels for K-12, self-scoring quizzes customized by Lexile® level, critical thinking questions, student commenting, Espanol AP articles, weekly lesson plans, weekly video, and even a weekend "Monday Morning Ready" newsletter as prep for the week ahead
Connect Plugged-In Students to Classic Literature A recent trend in online storytelling may offer opportunities for teachers looking to help connect students to literature. The Literary YouTube series seeks to transform classic works into video blogs set in the modern day. One of the earliest such series is also one of the most popular: The Lizzie Benet Diaries, an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. In this modernized version of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet is a 24-year-old grad student with a video blog, and the Bennet sisters—reduced to three rather than the original five—are just as concerned about jobs and school as they are about marriage. Frankenstein, MD, which teaches viewers about biology while following the exploits of Victoria Frankenstein, a medical student struggling to make a name for herself in a male-dominated field.
Click Here to Access Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Click Here to Access Frankenstein, MD
Click Here to Access Classic Alice
Click Here to Access The New Adventures of Peter and Wendy
Click Here to Access The March Family Letters
Graphing Stories is a new website that was developed by Dan Meyer and Buzz Math. Graphing Stories features 24 short videos that tell a story that students can graph to tell the mathematical story happening in the video. I recommend reading this post by Dan Meyer to get a full sense of how this works and where the idea came from. All of the graphing stories videos can be downloaded to use in your classroom. Graphing Stories even provides the graph paper for your students to graph the stories.
My Study Bar - a comprehensive set of portable open source and freeware applications to support learners with literacy difficulties. MyStudyBar is similar to popular commercial programs which use a floating toolbar to support literacy. The main difference is MyStudyBar is free. The toolbar includes a range of tools to support inclusion such as mind mapping, screen masking, word prediction, talking dictionary, text-to-speech, Save as MP3 and voice recognition. PC Only. (Speech recognition only works in Vista or Windows 7) http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eduapps/mystudybar.php
Nuskool This is a site that uses pop culture as teaching moments for students. Tailored to grades 6th-12th students learn a variety of subjects such as: Math, Science, English, etc through educational lessons based on the different elements of pop culture (video games, sports, films, etc.).
Textivate site for getting interactive activities based on text This works by copying and pasting text (up to 500) and then clicking a button. Then a wide variety of activities such as: fill in the blank, separate the words, tiles, and more can be chosen.
LitMap Project is a free community-powered site for locating books according to their geographic settings. Visit the homepage and click on the map to find books about any of the pinned locations on the map.
CAST eReader (PC & Mac) $10 http://www.ereader.com/product/browse/software
Natural Voice Reader (PC freeware) http://www.naturalreaders.com/
Read Please reads any text on a screen. http://www.readplease.com/
Word Talk reads text in a Word document http://www.wordtalk.org.uk/
Awesome Highlighter
By placing it on your FireFox toolbar, it highlights key notes in web pages, extract notes, create a short url, share or save. Awesome Highlighter can be used as a web note taking or reading comprehension tool. http://www.awesomehighlighter.com/
Rewordify is a free site that was developed by a special education teacher and former computer programmer for the purpose of helping students read complex passages. At its most basic level Rewordify takes a complex passage and rephrases it in simpler terms.video
Readability Scrubs web pages of distractions and provides a clean, comfortable view. Handy for reading longer articles. https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets
Writing
Tools
Read Write Think: K-12. Comprehensive literature and writing site resources/student-interactives
27 Videos That Can Help Students Improve Their Writing. www.freetech4teachers.com
Helping Young Writers Improve With a Unit on Word Choice A series of lessons focused on word choice can help high-achieving elementary school writers learn to revise their work
Writing Mini-Lessons: Strategies to Help Students Write Longer, More Developed Pieces
Chat GPT the new AI that could disrupt or support the modern classroom article
Illustrating Stories with Canva's AI Text to Image Tool - Resource link
UPSCHOOLupschool.co Includes book publishing Want your students to change the world? Take a look at Upschool, whose mission is to “change the world through purposeful education.” The site offers free courses and other learning materials to equip students with skills, inspiration, and support to solve real-world problems that have meaningful, long-term impact on communities across the world. Many offerings align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, empowering learners to tackle global challenges like social, environmental, and economic issues. video
826 Digital has a massive library of prompts, lessons, projects, and other resources for developing better writers. The Resource Library can be filtered by grade level, genre, literary device, and skill. Each resource comes with a step- by-step guide for the teacher and thoughtful slideshows, handouts, and other materials for students
The Writer's Workshop - 29 Videos That Can Help Students Improve Their Writing
The Writer's Workshop is a playlist of twenty-nine TED-Ed video lessons about writing. The The Writer's Workshop contains lessons on basic topics like how to use punctuation and point of view. It also offers videos about more difficult topics like how to make your writing humorous. www.freetech4teachers.com
Wriddle( gr. 1 - 2) Looking for an easy to use tool to help young children build digital-age literacy skills? Get your youngest learners writing, reading and illustrating sentences with Wriddle! The program includes the capability to record the student reading what she has written.
Word Tamer is a site for learning the process of developing characters, settings, and plots. Word Tamer is set up as an interactive journey through a carnival of literary devices. As students move through the carnival they develop characters, develop a setting, and develop a plot for their stories. At each stop in the Word Tamer carnival students can print out the words they have written. Along the way there are videos to help students understand the roles of characters, settings, and plot development in crafting a good story. www.freetech4teachers.com
How to Give Positive Feedback on Student Writing If your corrective feedback is very detailed but your positive comments are quick and vague, you may appreciate this advice from teachers across the country.
Creating Authentic Audiences for Student Work
Teachers can guide students to share their learning with different groups of people, creating a deeply engaging learning experience
Writing Unit on Folktales - handouts gr. 6 - 8
“Enter The Story” Tool For Introducing Classic Books Via “Choose Your Own Adventure”
Soundcite is a free tool that embeds audio directly into portions of text for use on your blog or website. Use Soundcite to bring emotion or context to a story through the use of a real audio file, be sure to check out the examples for ideas. Follow the advice on the site to add short audio clips after uploading to your server.
The Material Index of R.W.T.is a great collection of Flash-based, interactive activities target literacy skills for all grades. Some of the dozensof tools include: Bio-Cube for writing interesting biographies, Circle Plot Diagram, a story planner, Comic Creator for creating comic strips, Literary Elements Map, students can map out the key literary elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution, Literary Graffiti, aims to teach students to visualize what they are reading to help them develop as readers. Fractured Fairy Tale Creator, Eye on Idioms, Essay Map, and much more!!! https://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/student-interactives
Wordtune is a Chrome extension that provides suggestions on ways to rewrite sentences in your Google Documents, in your email (Gmail and Outlook), and in some social media accounts. Once you have Wordtune installed in Chrome you can simply highlight any sentence that you have written and click the Wordtune extension to have a list of alternate wordings suggested to you. www.freetech4teachers.com
Google Docs Templates to Use in Teaching Writing
NY Times Seven Unit Writing Program a seven-unit writing curriculum. They describe it as “A flexible program for middle and high schools based on the real-world writing found in newspapers, from editorials and reviews to personal narratives and analysis essays.”
The Writer's Workshop is a playlist of twenty-seven TED-Ed video lessons about writing. The The Writer's Workshop contains lessons on basic topics like how to use punctuation and point of view. It also offers videos about more difficult topics like how to make your writing humorous. www.freetech4teachers.com
Download this FREE Easel Assessment, Summarizing and Paraphrasing - Introduction and Pre-Assessment with EASEL gr 2 - 6
Dream Wakers, author and educator Ruth Culham focuses her love of children’s literature—and her decades of work developing the six traits of writing—on books that celebrate Latino life and culture. She presents a wide variety of ideas to teach writing using some of the richest and most beautiful children’s books available. Dream Wakers provides an annotated list of more than 120 books with do-it-today lesson ideas for teaching the traits of writing—Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, and Conventions. More than half of the books listed are bilingual or available as English or Spanish editions. Dream Wakers also includes 11 original, insightful essays by renowned children’s authors of some of the featured books. A reference chart helps teachers locate books quickly by trait, genre, language, and author/publisher information. Teachers can view the contents and preview the entire book online.
Writing Folktales lesson, including several handouts.
Make a Booksnap in 3 Easy Steps Booksnaps take a literacy twist to the idea of Snapchat! The idea is for students to use a digital tool to identify a portion of the text and share connections in a creative and meaningful way! “A BookSnap is simply a digital, visual representation used to annotate and share reflections of an excerpt of a book or text.” (Martin, T, 2017)
Scribophile is a respectful online writing group made up of writers who improve each other's work with thoughtful critiques and by sharing their writing experience. Scribophile is the writing group to join if you want to get the best feedback around, to learn how to get published, and to be a part of the friendliest and most successful writing workshop online.
Writing with Writers provides a wide variety of resources, educational materials and workshops to help students learn the craft of writing. They will also get access to a number of interactive tools to practice writing different compositional genres. There are 9 main writing categories to choose from: biography writing, descriptive writing, folktale writing, myth writing, news writing, poetry writing, speech writing, and book review writing.
The Literary Shed Find hundreds of ideas for using the visual resources of film, animation, photographs and picture books for teaching literacy. Each "shed" has a theme: The Mystery Shed, The Video Game Shed, The Fantasy Shed, The Myths Shed, The Picture Book Shed, and at least 25 more. Each "shed" has images and videos along with suggestions for using them. The activities and materials will appeal to many age groups from primary to college age. The Literacy shed is full of ideas for writing, creating, and improving your student's critical thinking skills. There are lesson plans with explicit instructions for writing.
Collaboration in the Global Classroom without WallsTravelling Tales is an online program in which students from schools all over the world collaborate to create stories. Students are sorted by age and assigned an issue on topics that vary—from environmental to social issues. Once assigned a topic or part of a story, students have 48 hours to work with their classmates to add to the story, complete with drawings and voiceovers, which teachers then upload to Adobe Spark.
SAS Writing Navigator suite of tools guides and supports students throughout the writing process: planning, drafting, revising, and publishing. The Writing Planner helps students determine their purpose and audience. They generate ideas and organize a plan, gather research information, group and sequence their ideas, and review their writing plans. With the Writing Drafter, students transform their plans into first drafts. They develop sentences, supporting details, and transitions; create introductory and concluding paragraphs; gather research information; and analyze their writing to improve sentence patterns and transitions. The Writing Reviser lets students refine their draft and gather research information. They focus on organization, sentence structure, and diction. By learning to ask questions experienced writers ask automatically, students begin to express themselves with greater precision and power. The Writing Publisher guides students as they complete their research and finish their essay. The Publisher tools aid students in proofreading and documenting sources using an innovative feature that generates internal citations and a Works Cited page. The Writing Navigator suite is available for the web, iPad, and Chromebook. Cost: FreeClick Here to Visit Website | Click Here to Visit iTunes App Store
Printing Press is a web tool from ReadWriteThink that you can use with students in class to easily create beautiful newspapers, flyers and brochures.
EssayTagger is a web-based tool that helps you grade your essays faster by eliminating the repetitive and inefficient aspects of grading papers. You’ll be able to speed up your grading process without sacrificing the quality of the feedback you give to your students.EssayTagger is not an auto-grader. You still do all the grading yourself, but now you can do it faster!
lesson plans to keep students engaged through the end of the year English Composition: Writing for an Audience
This video series introduces basic principles and strategies for communicating in writing to a variety of audiences and improving general composition skills. Throughout the series, students will meet a wide array of professionals whose work involves writing - not only authors, journalists, and teachers, but also musicians, judges, nurses, engineers, scientists, and athletes - who will discuss how they write with their specific audiences in mind. http://www.learner.org/resources/series128.html
Thoughtful Learning When you need an example written by a student, check out the vast collection of free student models. Scroll through the list, or search for a mode of writing such as “explanatory” or “persuasive.”
Character Development: Guidance for developing characters in student writing http://teacher.scholastic.com/writeit/fiction/draft/characterdevelopment.htm
Character Scrapbook: Reader response activity to analyze the characters in any book http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/scrapbook/
No Red Ink is a free site for students to help improve their writing and grammar skills. NRI uses differentiated learning so it adapts to student's needs and focuses on the areas they need help in. Also, NRI focuses on a student's content area interest to keep writing interesting and exciting. Finally, teachers can use NRI for testing and assessing a student's needs as well as generate maps/reports for student/class tracking. http://noredink.com
Hero’s Journey “The hero's journey is an ancient story pattern that can be found in texts from thousands of years ago or in newly released Hollywood blockbusters. This interactive tool will provide students with background on the hero's journey and give them a chance to explore several of the journey's key elements. Students can use the tool to record examples from a hero's journey they have read or viewed or to plan out a hero's journey of their own.”
Amazon Storybuilder is a cloud-based writing tool from Amazon Studios that can be used to create stories . Amazon Storybuilder uses “notecards” to represent a single beat or event in a story, just as screenwriters have for years used actual physical notecards to represent story beats on corkboards around the world. Storybuilder notecards can include both text and images. You can string individual cards together into a sequence on a virtual “corkboard” to convey a narrative and tell your story. Unlike physical notecards, it is easy to share Storybuilder projects and it is easy to take them wherever you go with your laptop, phone, tablet or Kindle.'
Historic Tale Construction Kit
Using this digital storytelling tool, students can select among menus of folk (brave and ordinary), buildings, and beasts; add their own text in the colors of their choice; adjust the scale of the items they select; and create an authentic looking Medieval comic striphttp://www.adgame-wonderland.de/type/bayeux.php
Checklist of Focus Correction Areas
Create your own checklist. Choose from a menu or correction areas or create your own. http://pblchecklist.4teachers.org/
Diffen is a nice resource for those times when you need a quick comparison of two things. Let's say you need a chart to highlight the differences between latitude and longitude, Diffen has that. Or perhaps you need a comparison of Medicare and Medicaid, Diffen has that too.
If you can't find the comparison that you need, you can create your own on Diffen. Diffen is a community site. Anyone who registers on Diffen can contribute to the comparisons on the site. Comparisons are not limited to text. Images can be added to the comparison charts on Diffen. An embed code is available for each chart.
Story Jumper
An online tool that makes creative writing fun for kids. Using our interactive workbook and lesson plans, teachers spark students' interest in developing and writing complete stories. Kids can then put their creativity and project skills to work in crafting their very own professionally published hard-back books! http://www.storyjumper.com/main/teacher
Tar Heel Reader. It has audio support for the text It makes it as simple as you can get for students to create their own “talking” books using images from Flickr.
Jellybean Writer is a free tool for creating picture books. Students can import pictures from their computers then write captions for each image. A variety of layout templates, background colors, and fonts are available to Jellybean Writer users. All stories can be saved online or downloaded and printed. If picture books are too simple for your students, they can skip using pictures and select one of the text only templates for the pages in their books. You do have to create an account to access the reading questions and writing tools on Jellybean Scoop. Teachers who create accounts for themselves can also create and manage accounts for their students.
Writing Fix Interactive writing prompts. http://www.writingfix.com/
Playfic is a tool for creating text-based, choose your own adventure stories. When authors plan and write their stories they can include multiple paths for readers to pursue as they progress through their stories. Readers navigate through the stories by entering directional commands such as "go north" and "go south." Click here to try a sample story and learn a bit about the logic of Playfic.
Writing Fun
http://www.writingfun.com/video intro http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/3gems/index.html
The Material Index A great collection of Flash-based, interactive activities target literacy skills for all grades. Some of the dozensof tools include: Bio-Cube for writing interesting biographies, Circle Plot Diagram, a story planner, Comic Creator for creating comic strips, Literary Elements Map, students can map out the key literary elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution, Literary Graffiti, aims to teach students to visualize what they are reading to help them develop as readers. Fractured Fairy Tale Creator, Eye on Idioms, Essay Map, and much more!!! http://readwritethink.org/student_mat/index.asp
PictLits
PicLits.com is a creative writing site that matches beautiful images with carefully selected keywords in order to inspire you. The object is to put the right words in the right place and the right order to capture the essence, story, and meaning of the picture.http://piclits.com/compose_dragdrop.aspx
Novlet http://www.novlet.com/ Collaborative, nonlinear story writing
Fotobabble http://www.fotobabble.com/ Create talking photos in three steps
Witoku An interviewing tool to record interviews. Includes embedded code for uploading to Web page http://wetoku.com/
Word Mover used in your web browser. Word Mover is designed to help students develop poems and short stories. When students open Word Mover they are shown a selection of words that they can drag onto a canvas to construct a poem or story. Word Mover provides students with eight canvas backgrounds on which they can construct their poems.
Can I Have a Word?
http://www.barbican.org.uk/canihaveaword/ This site won the education Webby award, contains projects that include readings by British poets, visual components, and lesson plans for expanding the creative writing of students
Kid Publications: K-5. Children can publish their own stories, read other children's stories, and collaboratively write stories. https://www.kidpub.com/
Kids Love to Learn Interactive writing for grades 3-6 http://www.2learn.ca/kids/LangArts/listLAWriting.asp?ID2=2
Zhura
Screen writing software. Simplifies the process with templates. Good for newscasts, podcasts and plays. http://www.zhura.com/
Create Your Scenario
A tool that lets elementary students select characters, type lines for each one, save their work, and generate a playscript. http://www.kids-space.org/HPT/1a/11a.html
StoryMash A creative writing community for authors, amateur writers, readers and anyone interested in collaborative fiction and collaborative creative writing. http://storymash.com/
Storybird http://storybird.com/ Free online publishing and stories by others you can read. Also has the capabilities to write cooperative stories.
Story Creator
A unique story making tool, a sound and picture gallery, and a timeline to place the stories in their historic context. http://myths.e2bn.net/create/tool527-new--story-creator-2--beta.html
A Lesson in Writing Myths The Hero's Journey is an online writing activity produced by Read Write Think. The Hero's Journey is an interactive resource that teaches students about the key elements required in developing a myth about a heroic character. The lessons are rooted in stories like The Odyssey. After reading about the elements required in a good hero story students can create their own stories by using the template provided by Read Write Think. Completed stories must printed in order to be saved.
Generator BlogA fantastic blog that contains links to all sorts of free, interesting generators (such as cereal boxes, insurance cards, money, etc.) that would be great tools for students to use in creating creative advertising campaigns http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/
iAdventures
http://warrensburg.k12.mo.us/iadventure/index.html
An iAdventure is a problem solving activity in which students determine the direction and outcome of a content-rich storyline, using resources available on the Internet, particularly resources providing real-world data and primary documents.
Talking Cats GeneratorCreate a slideshow dialogue with speech bubbles. There are also links to a squirrel, an owl, a tomato, and a flower generator on this page that can be used as well. This gives students another choice! http://www.fodey.com/generators/animated/talking_cat.asp
Lexipedia
This is a visual representation of a thesaurus. Enter a word and related words will be created in an array. As you scroll over the word, its meaning will pop up in a bubble. You can even listen to the meaining. Great for building vocabulary! http://www.lexipedia.com/
Read Write Think: K-12. Comprehensive literature and writing site resources/student-interactives
27 Videos That Can Help Students Improve Their Writing. www.freetech4teachers.com
Helping Young Writers Improve With a Unit on Word Choice A series of lessons focused on word choice can help high-achieving elementary school writers learn to revise their work
Writing Mini-Lessons: Strategies to Help Students Write Longer, More Developed Pieces
Chat GPT the new AI that could disrupt or support the modern classroom article
Illustrating Stories with Canva's AI Text to Image Tool - Resource link
UPSCHOOLupschool.co Includes book publishing Want your students to change the world? Take a look at Upschool, whose mission is to “change the world through purposeful education.” The site offers free courses and other learning materials to equip students with skills, inspiration, and support to solve real-world problems that have meaningful, long-term impact on communities across the world. Many offerings align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, empowering learners to tackle global challenges like social, environmental, and economic issues. video
826 Digital has a massive library of prompts, lessons, projects, and other resources for developing better writers. The Resource Library can be filtered by grade level, genre, literary device, and skill. Each resource comes with a step- by-step guide for the teacher and thoughtful slideshows, handouts, and other materials for students
The Writer's Workshop - 29 Videos That Can Help Students Improve Their Writing
The Writer's Workshop is a playlist of twenty-nine TED-Ed video lessons about writing. The The Writer's Workshop contains lessons on basic topics like how to use punctuation and point of view. It also offers videos about more difficult topics like how to make your writing humorous. www.freetech4teachers.com
Wriddle( gr. 1 - 2) Looking for an easy to use tool to help young children build digital-age literacy skills? Get your youngest learners writing, reading and illustrating sentences with Wriddle! The program includes the capability to record the student reading what she has written.
Word Tamer is a site for learning the process of developing characters, settings, and plots. Word Tamer is set up as an interactive journey through a carnival of literary devices. As students move through the carnival they develop characters, develop a setting, and develop a plot for their stories. At each stop in the Word Tamer carnival students can print out the words they have written. Along the way there are videos to help students understand the roles of characters, settings, and plot development in crafting a good story. www.freetech4teachers.com
How to Give Positive Feedback on Student Writing If your corrective feedback is very detailed but your positive comments are quick and vague, you may appreciate this advice from teachers across the country.
Creating Authentic Audiences for Student Work
Teachers can guide students to share their learning with different groups of people, creating a deeply engaging learning experience
Writing Unit on Folktales - handouts gr. 6 - 8
“Enter The Story” Tool For Introducing Classic Books Via “Choose Your Own Adventure”
Soundcite is a free tool that embeds audio directly into portions of text for use on your blog or website. Use Soundcite to bring emotion or context to a story through the use of a real audio file, be sure to check out the examples for ideas. Follow the advice on the site to add short audio clips after uploading to your server.
The Material Index of R.W.T.is a great collection of Flash-based, interactive activities target literacy skills for all grades. Some of the dozensof tools include: Bio-Cube for writing interesting biographies, Circle Plot Diagram, a story planner, Comic Creator for creating comic strips, Literary Elements Map, students can map out the key literary elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution, Literary Graffiti, aims to teach students to visualize what they are reading to help them develop as readers. Fractured Fairy Tale Creator, Eye on Idioms, Essay Map, and much more!!! https://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/student-interactives
Wordtune is a Chrome extension that provides suggestions on ways to rewrite sentences in your Google Documents, in your email (Gmail and Outlook), and in some social media accounts. Once you have Wordtune installed in Chrome you can simply highlight any sentence that you have written and click the Wordtune extension to have a list of alternate wordings suggested to you. www.freetech4teachers.com
Google Docs Templates to Use in Teaching Writing
NY Times Seven Unit Writing Program a seven-unit writing curriculum. They describe it as “A flexible program for middle and high schools based on the real-world writing found in newspapers, from editorials and reviews to personal narratives and analysis essays.”
The Writer's Workshop is a playlist of twenty-seven TED-Ed video lessons about writing. The The Writer's Workshop contains lessons on basic topics like how to use punctuation and point of view. It also offers videos about more difficult topics like how to make your writing humorous. www.freetech4teachers.com
Download this FREE Easel Assessment, Summarizing and Paraphrasing - Introduction and Pre-Assessment with EASEL gr 2 - 6
Dream Wakers, author and educator Ruth Culham focuses her love of children’s literature—and her decades of work developing the six traits of writing—on books that celebrate Latino life and culture. She presents a wide variety of ideas to teach writing using some of the richest and most beautiful children’s books available. Dream Wakers provides an annotated list of more than 120 books with do-it-today lesson ideas for teaching the traits of writing—Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, and Conventions. More than half of the books listed are bilingual or available as English or Spanish editions. Dream Wakers also includes 11 original, insightful essays by renowned children’s authors of some of the featured books. A reference chart helps teachers locate books quickly by trait, genre, language, and author/publisher information. Teachers can view the contents and preview the entire book online.
Writing Folktales lesson, including several handouts.
Make a Booksnap in 3 Easy Steps Booksnaps take a literacy twist to the idea of Snapchat! The idea is for students to use a digital tool to identify a portion of the text and share connections in a creative and meaningful way! “A BookSnap is simply a digital, visual representation used to annotate and share reflections of an excerpt of a book or text.” (Martin, T, 2017)
Scribophile is a respectful online writing group made up of writers who improve each other's work with thoughtful critiques and by sharing their writing experience. Scribophile is the writing group to join if you want to get the best feedback around, to learn how to get published, and to be a part of the friendliest and most successful writing workshop online.
Writing with Writers provides a wide variety of resources, educational materials and workshops to help students learn the craft of writing. They will also get access to a number of interactive tools to practice writing different compositional genres. There are 9 main writing categories to choose from: biography writing, descriptive writing, folktale writing, myth writing, news writing, poetry writing, speech writing, and book review writing.
The Literary Shed Find hundreds of ideas for using the visual resources of film, animation, photographs and picture books for teaching literacy. Each "shed" has a theme: The Mystery Shed, The Video Game Shed, The Fantasy Shed, The Myths Shed, The Picture Book Shed, and at least 25 more. Each "shed" has images and videos along with suggestions for using them. The activities and materials will appeal to many age groups from primary to college age. The Literacy shed is full of ideas for writing, creating, and improving your student's critical thinking skills. There are lesson plans with explicit instructions for writing.
Collaboration in the Global Classroom without WallsTravelling Tales is an online program in which students from schools all over the world collaborate to create stories. Students are sorted by age and assigned an issue on topics that vary—from environmental to social issues. Once assigned a topic or part of a story, students have 48 hours to work with their classmates to add to the story, complete with drawings and voiceovers, which teachers then upload to Adobe Spark.
SAS Writing Navigator suite of tools guides and supports students throughout the writing process: planning, drafting, revising, and publishing. The Writing Planner helps students determine their purpose and audience. They generate ideas and organize a plan, gather research information, group and sequence their ideas, and review their writing plans. With the Writing Drafter, students transform their plans into first drafts. They develop sentences, supporting details, and transitions; create introductory and concluding paragraphs; gather research information; and analyze their writing to improve sentence patterns and transitions. The Writing Reviser lets students refine their draft and gather research information. They focus on organization, sentence structure, and diction. By learning to ask questions experienced writers ask automatically, students begin to express themselves with greater precision and power. The Writing Publisher guides students as they complete their research and finish their essay. The Publisher tools aid students in proofreading and documenting sources using an innovative feature that generates internal citations and a Works Cited page. The Writing Navigator suite is available for the web, iPad, and Chromebook. Cost: FreeClick Here to Visit Website | Click Here to Visit iTunes App Store
Printing Press is a web tool from ReadWriteThink that you can use with students in class to easily create beautiful newspapers, flyers and brochures.
EssayTagger is a web-based tool that helps you grade your essays faster by eliminating the repetitive and inefficient aspects of grading papers. You’ll be able to speed up your grading process without sacrificing the quality of the feedback you give to your students.EssayTagger is not an auto-grader. You still do all the grading yourself, but now you can do it faster!
lesson plans to keep students engaged through the end of the year English Composition: Writing for an Audience
This video series introduces basic principles and strategies for communicating in writing to a variety of audiences and improving general composition skills. Throughout the series, students will meet a wide array of professionals whose work involves writing - not only authors, journalists, and teachers, but also musicians, judges, nurses, engineers, scientists, and athletes - who will discuss how they write with their specific audiences in mind. http://www.learner.org/resources/series128.html
Thoughtful Learning When you need an example written by a student, check out the vast collection of free student models. Scroll through the list, or search for a mode of writing such as “explanatory” or “persuasive.”
Character Development: Guidance for developing characters in student writing http://teacher.scholastic.com/writeit/fiction/draft/characterdevelopment.htm
Character Scrapbook: Reader response activity to analyze the characters in any book http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/scrapbook/
No Red Ink is a free site for students to help improve their writing and grammar skills. NRI uses differentiated learning so it adapts to student's needs and focuses on the areas they need help in. Also, NRI focuses on a student's content area interest to keep writing interesting and exciting. Finally, teachers can use NRI for testing and assessing a student's needs as well as generate maps/reports for student/class tracking. http://noredink.com
Hero’s Journey “The hero's journey is an ancient story pattern that can be found in texts from thousands of years ago or in newly released Hollywood blockbusters. This interactive tool will provide students with background on the hero's journey and give them a chance to explore several of the journey's key elements. Students can use the tool to record examples from a hero's journey they have read or viewed or to plan out a hero's journey of their own.”
Amazon Storybuilder is a cloud-based writing tool from Amazon Studios that can be used to create stories . Amazon Storybuilder uses “notecards” to represent a single beat or event in a story, just as screenwriters have for years used actual physical notecards to represent story beats on corkboards around the world. Storybuilder notecards can include both text and images. You can string individual cards together into a sequence on a virtual “corkboard” to convey a narrative and tell your story. Unlike physical notecards, it is easy to share Storybuilder projects and it is easy to take them wherever you go with your laptop, phone, tablet or Kindle.'
Historic Tale Construction Kit
Using this digital storytelling tool, students can select among menus of folk (brave and ordinary), buildings, and beasts; add their own text in the colors of their choice; adjust the scale of the items they select; and create an authentic looking Medieval comic striphttp://www.adgame-wonderland.de/type/bayeux.php
Checklist of Focus Correction Areas
Create your own checklist. Choose from a menu or correction areas or create your own. http://pblchecklist.4teachers.org/
Diffen is a nice resource for those times when you need a quick comparison of two things. Let's say you need a chart to highlight the differences between latitude and longitude, Diffen has that. Or perhaps you need a comparison of Medicare and Medicaid, Diffen has that too.
If you can't find the comparison that you need, you can create your own on Diffen. Diffen is a community site. Anyone who registers on Diffen can contribute to the comparisons on the site. Comparisons are not limited to text. Images can be added to the comparison charts on Diffen. An embed code is available for each chart.
Story Jumper
An online tool that makes creative writing fun for kids. Using our interactive workbook and lesson plans, teachers spark students' interest in developing and writing complete stories. Kids can then put their creativity and project skills to work in crafting their very own professionally published hard-back books! http://www.storyjumper.com/main/teacher
Tar Heel Reader. It has audio support for the text It makes it as simple as you can get for students to create their own “talking” books using images from Flickr.
Jellybean Writer is a free tool for creating picture books. Students can import pictures from their computers then write captions for each image. A variety of layout templates, background colors, and fonts are available to Jellybean Writer users. All stories can be saved online or downloaded and printed. If picture books are too simple for your students, they can skip using pictures and select one of the text only templates for the pages in their books. You do have to create an account to access the reading questions and writing tools on Jellybean Scoop. Teachers who create accounts for themselves can also create and manage accounts for their students.
Writing Fix Interactive writing prompts. http://www.writingfix.com/
Playfic is a tool for creating text-based, choose your own adventure stories. When authors plan and write their stories they can include multiple paths for readers to pursue as they progress through their stories. Readers navigate through the stories by entering directional commands such as "go north" and "go south." Click here to try a sample story and learn a bit about the logic of Playfic.
Writing Fun
http://www.writingfun.com/video intro http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/3gems/index.html
The Material Index A great collection of Flash-based, interactive activities target literacy skills for all grades. Some of the dozensof tools include: Bio-Cube for writing interesting biographies, Circle Plot Diagram, a story planner, Comic Creator for creating comic strips, Literary Elements Map, students can map out the key literary elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution, Literary Graffiti, aims to teach students to visualize what they are reading to help them develop as readers. Fractured Fairy Tale Creator, Eye on Idioms, Essay Map, and much more!!! http://readwritethink.org/student_mat/index.asp
PictLits
PicLits.com is a creative writing site that matches beautiful images with carefully selected keywords in order to inspire you. The object is to put the right words in the right place and the right order to capture the essence, story, and meaning of the picture.http://piclits.com/compose_dragdrop.aspx
Novlet http://www.novlet.com/ Collaborative, nonlinear story writing
Fotobabble http://www.fotobabble.com/ Create talking photos in three steps
Witoku An interviewing tool to record interviews. Includes embedded code for uploading to Web page http://wetoku.com/
Word Mover used in your web browser. Word Mover is designed to help students develop poems and short stories. When students open Word Mover they are shown a selection of words that they can drag onto a canvas to construct a poem or story. Word Mover provides students with eight canvas backgrounds on which they can construct their poems.
Can I Have a Word?
http://www.barbican.org.uk/canihaveaword/ This site won the education Webby award, contains projects that include readings by British poets, visual components, and lesson plans for expanding the creative writing of students
Kid Publications: K-5. Children can publish their own stories, read other children's stories, and collaboratively write stories. https://www.kidpub.com/
Kids Love to Learn Interactive writing for grades 3-6 http://www.2learn.ca/kids/LangArts/listLAWriting.asp?ID2=2
Zhura
Screen writing software. Simplifies the process with templates. Good for newscasts, podcasts and plays. http://www.zhura.com/
Create Your Scenario
A tool that lets elementary students select characters, type lines for each one, save their work, and generate a playscript. http://www.kids-space.org/HPT/1a/11a.html
StoryMash A creative writing community for authors, amateur writers, readers and anyone interested in collaborative fiction and collaborative creative writing. http://storymash.com/
Storybird http://storybird.com/ Free online publishing and stories by others you can read. Also has the capabilities to write cooperative stories.
Story Creator
A unique story making tool, a sound and picture gallery, and a timeline to place the stories in their historic context. http://myths.e2bn.net/create/tool527-new--story-creator-2--beta.html
A Lesson in Writing Myths The Hero's Journey is an online writing activity produced by Read Write Think. The Hero's Journey is an interactive resource that teaches students about the key elements required in developing a myth about a heroic character. The lessons are rooted in stories like The Odyssey. After reading about the elements required in a good hero story students can create their own stories by using the template provided by Read Write Think. Completed stories must printed in order to be saved.
Generator BlogA fantastic blog that contains links to all sorts of free, interesting generators (such as cereal boxes, insurance cards, money, etc.) that would be great tools for students to use in creating creative advertising campaigns http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/
iAdventures
http://warrensburg.k12.mo.us/iadventure/index.html
An iAdventure is a problem solving activity in which students determine the direction and outcome of a content-rich storyline, using resources available on the Internet, particularly resources providing real-world data and primary documents.
Talking Cats GeneratorCreate a slideshow dialogue with speech bubbles. There are also links to a squirrel, an owl, a tomato, and a flower generator on this page that can be used as well. This gives students another choice! http://www.fodey.com/generators/animated/talking_cat.asp
Lexipedia
This is a visual representation of a thesaurus. Enter a word and related words will be created in an array. As you scroll over the word, its meaning will pop up in a bubble. You can even listen to the meaining. Great for building vocabulary! http://www.lexipedia.com/
Word Clouds
Wordle
Create word clouds to analyze text. How to use video http://www.wordle.net/
starter sheet | 46 ways to use Wordle
Tagul a web service that enables you to create beautiful looking tag clouds and embed it on your web page. http://tagul.com/
Tagxedo
Nice variety of shapes. http://www.tagxedo.com/
WordSiftCreates word clouds like Wordle. Many uses for examining student writing and professional writers and speech makers. http://www.wordsift.com/
Word It Out wide variety of customized options http://worditout.com/
ABCYA
Good for little ones. Note the download button in lower left corner http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm
VocabGrabber
Similar to Wordle with good integration samples. Not flashy but good for understanding passages. It analyzes text and generates lists of the most useful vocabulary. Also click on any word in the cloud and asnapshot of ta visual thesaurus appears. http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/
TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud. http://tagcrowd.com/
Wordle
Create word clouds to analyze text. How to use video http://www.wordle.net/
starter sheet | 46 ways to use Wordle
Tagul a web service that enables you to create beautiful looking tag clouds and embed it on your web page. http://tagul.com/
Tagxedo
Nice variety of shapes. http://www.tagxedo.com/
WordSiftCreates word clouds like Wordle. Many uses for examining student writing and professional writers and speech makers. http://www.wordsift.com/
Word It Out wide variety of customized options http://worditout.com/
ABCYA
Good for little ones. Note the download button in lower left corner http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm
VocabGrabber
Similar to Wordle with good integration samples. Not flashy but good for understanding passages. It analyzes text and generates lists of the most useful vocabulary. Also click on any word in the cloud and asnapshot of ta visual thesaurus appears. http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/
TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud. http://tagcrowd.com/
Comics and Cartoons
MakeBeliefsComix
Allows students to create comic strips up to four panels and print them. Supports English, Spanish, French, Italian German, Latin and more languages. http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/
Pikistrips
Free, well-designed software that lets you create comic strips and save them for others to view. http://www.comeeko.com/
Create a Superhero lesson
Toon Doo
Creaqte comic strips with clip art and speech bubbles http://www.toondoo.com/
BitStrips An easy to use comic building site. Students can use this webtool to create a comic cell, strip, or story and then share it with their peers or the world. Use with illustrating a scene from a novel, or even to help a student understand a complex theory such as gravity in science. http://www.bitstrips.com/
Little Bird Tales allows your students to create a story, animate it, narrate it, and publish it! It's strong point is simplicity! You do have to register for an account, http://www.littlebirdtales.com/
Comic Brush
A tool that lets you create and share a comic using any combination of your own drawings, photos and ready-to-use artwork.You can choose from the site's library of backgrounds, characters and speech balloons, add your own text or captions, and even your own photos. http://www.comicbrush.com/
ZimmerTwins Gr. 1-3 - Create cartoon movies http://www.zimmertwins.com/
Talking Cats Generator Create a slideshow dialogue with speech bubbles. There are also links to a squirrel, an owl, a tomato, and a flower generator on this page that can be used as well. This gives students another choice! http://www.fodey.com/generators/animated/talking_cat.asp
Memoov Created animated videos http://memoov.com/index.aspx
xtranormal
This tool provides you al of the tools a movie director would have to select a set, actor sound efects, etc and create amovie made from only the dialogue text you type into the tool. Generates a movie you embed and you can then exort diretly to YouTube. However, you are left to work with media xtranormal provides. http://www.xtraormal.com/
MakeBeliefsComix
Allows students to create comic strips up to four panels and print them. Supports English, Spanish, French, Italian German, Latin and more languages. http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/
Pikistrips
Free, well-designed software that lets you create comic strips and save them for others to view. http://www.comeeko.com/
Create a Superhero lesson
Toon Doo
Creaqte comic strips with clip art and speech bubbles http://www.toondoo.com/
BitStrips An easy to use comic building site. Students can use this webtool to create a comic cell, strip, or story and then share it with their peers or the world. Use with illustrating a scene from a novel, or even to help a student understand a complex theory such as gravity in science. http://www.bitstrips.com/
Little Bird Tales allows your students to create a story, animate it, narrate it, and publish it! It's strong point is simplicity! You do have to register for an account, http://www.littlebirdtales.com/
Comic Brush
A tool that lets you create and share a comic using any combination of your own drawings, photos and ready-to-use artwork.You can choose from the site's library of backgrounds, characters and speech balloons, add your own text or captions, and even your own photos. http://www.comicbrush.com/
ZimmerTwins Gr. 1-3 - Create cartoon movies http://www.zimmertwins.com/
Talking Cats Generator Create a slideshow dialogue with speech bubbles. There are also links to a squirrel, an owl, a tomato, and a flower generator on this page that can be used as well. This gives students another choice! http://www.fodey.com/generators/animated/talking_cat.asp
Memoov Created animated videos http://memoov.com/index.aspx
xtranormal
This tool provides you al of the tools a movie director would have to select a set, actor sound efects, etc and create amovie made from only the dialogue text you type into the tool. Generates a movie you embed and you can then exort diretly to YouTube. However, you are left to work with media xtranormal provides. http://www.xtraormal.com/
Citation
Easybib Bibliography and citation guide http://www.easybib.com/
Seven Citation Resources with tutorials
Doc Cop Doc Cop is a plagiarism, cryptomnesia and collusion detection tool that creates reports displaying the correlation and matches between documents or a document and the Web. Doc Cop gathers the evidence, and provides the information required for a teacher or a student to judge whether plagiarism, cryptomnesia or collusion has occurred. Doc Cop is a free alternative to paid services such as TurnItIn.com. It can be a useful tool, not only to catch students cheating, but can also be used to explain what plagiarism is and they can avoid it. http://www.doccop.com/index.html?nc=81969919
NoodleTools (bibliography generator and search advice) http://www.NoodleTools.com/
Citation Machine http://www.landmark-project.com/citation_machine/index.php3
Easybib Bibliography and citation guide http://www.easybib.com/
Seven Citation Resources with tutorials
Doc Cop Doc Cop is a plagiarism, cryptomnesia and collusion detection tool that creates reports displaying the correlation and matches between documents or a document and the Web. Doc Cop gathers the evidence, and provides the information required for a teacher or a student to judge whether plagiarism, cryptomnesia or collusion has occurred. Doc Cop is a free alternative to paid services such as TurnItIn.com. It can be a useful tool, not only to catch students cheating, but can also be used to explain what plagiarism is and they can avoid it. http://www.doccop.com/index.html?nc=81969919
NoodleTools (bibliography generator and search advice) http://www.NoodleTools.com/
Citation Machine http://www.landmark-project.com/citation_machine/index.php3
Newspapers and Magazines
Newscred
Create a free online newspaper http://www.newscred.com/
Crayon - Create a professional-looking newspaper with this nice online creator. There are several options to choose from, so it has a bit of a higher learning curve.http://crayon.net/
Fodey
Students enter text for a fictious news article. Then dowload a picture to create a headline and story that looks like a real newspaper http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp
Young Writers
Magazine with writing support and accepts students submissions (7-12) http://www.young-writer.co.uk/
The Newspaper Clipping Generatorhttp://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.aspHelps students summarize articles. Students take an article or a blog post and make decisions as to what to include, what to delete, and what to substitue in order to summarize.
Issuu - One of the most popular and successful online digital magazine creators/publishers around, with a very nice user interface.
Calaméo Similar to issuu and scribd, but allows word as well as pdf upload. Embed code provided for uploaded documents.
Create your own ebooks
Yudu - Upload a document or PDF to create an online magazine that can be emailed our or embedded into a site.
Openzine - Very user friendly site with an abundance of templates and layouts to create a professional-looking magazine and share online.
Scribd - A very popular Web 2.0 site for creating online content and publishing.
Zinepal - A great way to bring the news to students by "clipping" online articles. This is a wonderful site for those making the move to ebook readers.
Paper.li - A fantastic site to turn Twitter into an online readable magazine. 9. Guzzle.it - Is a news aggregator that puts online news in one customizable place. 10. Crayon - Create a professional-looking newspaper with this nice online creator. There are several options to choose from, so it has a bit of a higher learning curve.
Guzzle.it - Is a news aggregator that puts online news in one customizable place.
Newsvine News source for students. It’s a clean and friendly social news site containing articles from the Associated Press, ESPN, and New Scientist as well as user contributions. Students can browse the site comfortably, rate news articles, participate in article discussion, and even start their own news column where they can write and publish articles.
My Brochure Maker Design brochures and flyers by selecting themes and templates, editing the text, adding your own images, and printing.
Embedit - The document sharing and embedding application, Embedit.in, makes uploading a document and embedding it on a classroom blog or web site exceedingly easy. Can create thumbnails to click on to access documents.
Formatpixel.com – Create online applications like magazines, brochures and portfolios and customize them by adding text,
images etc.
UDL - Using the online platform, authors input text, images, sound, and hyperlinks, as desired. All text can be read aloud in English or Spanish with the click of a button and no extra work by the author.
Simplebooklet No sign up required (free account also available to save booklets). Click CREATE and begin to insert text, image, url, upload files, embed codes & music. Add multiple pages to the booklet & click PUBLISH when complete. You can also print it out. Other similar tools PrintableFlyerTemplates, Band-Flyers, MyBrochureMaker, BookletCreator and Pocketmod.
Pen.io Simple no frills publishing and editing site.
Newscred
Create a free online newspaper http://www.newscred.com/
Crayon - Create a professional-looking newspaper with this nice online creator. There are several options to choose from, so it has a bit of a higher learning curve.http://crayon.net/
Fodey
Students enter text for a fictious news article. Then dowload a picture to create a headline and story that looks like a real newspaper http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp
Young Writers
Magazine with writing support and accepts students submissions (7-12) http://www.young-writer.co.uk/
The Newspaper Clipping Generatorhttp://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.aspHelps students summarize articles. Students take an article or a blog post and make decisions as to what to include, what to delete, and what to substitue in order to summarize.
Issuu - One of the most popular and successful online digital magazine creators/publishers around, with a very nice user interface.
Calaméo Similar to issuu and scribd, but allows word as well as pdf upload. Embed code provided for uploaded documents.
Create your own ebooks
Yudu - Upload a document or PDF to create an online magazine that can be emailed our or embedded into a site.
Openzine - Very user friendly site with an abundance of templates and layouts to create a professional-looking magazine and share online.
Scribd - A very popular Web 2.0 site for creating online content and publishing.
Zinepal - A great way to bring the news to students by "clipping" online articles. This is a wonderful site for those making the move to ebook readers.
Paper.li - A fantastic site to turn Twitter into an online readable magazine. 9. Guzzle.it - Is a news aggregator that puts online news in one customizable place. 10. Crayon - Create a professional-looking newspaper with this nice online creator. There are several options to choose from, so it has a bit of a higher learning curve.
Guzzle.it - Is a news aggregator that puts online news in one customizable place.
Newsvine News source for students. It’s a clean and friendly social news site containing articles from the Associated Press, ESPN, and New Scientist as well as user contributions. Students can browse the site comfortably, rate news articles, participate in article discussion, and even start their own news column where they can write and publish articles.
My Brochure Maker Design brochures and flyers by selecting themes and templates, editing the text, adding your own images, and printing.
Embedit - The document sharing and embedding application, Embedit.in, makes uploading a document and embedding it on a classroom blog or web site exceedingly easy. Can create thumbnails to click on to access documents.
Formatpixel.com – Create online applications like magazines, brochures and portfolios and customize them by adding text,
images etc.
UDL - Using the online platform, authors input text, images, sound, and hyperlinks, as desired. All text can be read aloud in English or Spanish with the click of a button and no extra work by the author.
Simplebooklet No sign up required (free account also available to save booklets). Click CREATE and begin to insert text, image, url, upload files, embed codes & music. Add multiple pages to the booklet & click PUBLISH when complete. You can also print it out. Other similar tools PrintableFlyerTemplates, Band-Flyers, MyBrochureMaker, BookletCreator and Pocketmod.
Pen.io Simple no frills publishing and editing site.
ZooBurst Create 3D pop-up books free http://www.zooburst.com
Create a Book
Create an electronic book that can also be printed. http://bookbuilder.cast.org/
My Storymakerhttp://www.carnegielibrary.org/kids/mystorymaker
Create storybooks with animated characters
Blurb A service that helps you to create, publish, and purchase your own custom book. You can create a cookbook, a photobook, or even turn your blog into a book. You have to download “booksmart”, which is the software that helps you to make a book. http://www.blurb.com/
Big Universe
Students can create their own picture books with just a few clicks. Or if you want, you can read countless other books written by students. The professional illustrations and layout options offer the ultimate in publishing of students' writing. Watch the Tips and Tricks tutorial to see how the features work. Due to the minor advertising, blogs, and internet retailing, teachers should monitor students closely or use this website as a whole-class activity. http://www.biguniverse.com/
Tikatok
Tikatok is where kids channel their imagination into stories - publish those stories into books for you to share and treasure with friends and family. http://www.tikatok.com/
Essay - Thesis
OuiWrite OW is a very innovative site that students use to create a paper. While they are typing their paper OQ automatically searches for content they are typing about and find them sources. These sources can then be cited or added as a bibliography automatically. Also, OuiWrite has other great features such as a: genius button (w/ a very cool counter point feature), built in dictionary/thesaurus, as well as the ability to check for plagiarism. Finally, OuiWrite has built in templates for creating different types of papers and bibliographies, as well as saving everything on the web
Thesis Builder
An online tool for developing persuasive essays. http://tommarch.com/electraguide/
Essay Prompts Numerous essay prompts for high school classes and college admission practice http://www.eduers.com/University/College_Admission_Essay_Topics.html
Essay Map
Online graphic organizer for 3 paragraph essay http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/essaymap/
Quotes.Net Source for quotes http://www.quotes.net
PowerPoint Presentations on Student Research
Topics include: Building Better Research, Collaboration, Plagerism and Putting the Pieces Together. http://ed.sc.gov/agency/offices/tech/ms/lms/page1360.html
Research Paper Organizer
Interactive guide to planning, researching, and writing a research paper. http://library.sasaustin.org/sasaustin/library/paperOrganizerUS.php
NoteStar
NoteStar is an Internet utility to assist in the preparation of research papers. Teachers and students can set up research projects with topics and sub-topics. Students may then take advantage of NoteStar's many features to collect and organize their notes and prepare their bibliography page. http://notestar.4teachers.org/
Think Tank Think Tank is designed to help students develop a Research Organizer (a list of topics and subtopics) for reports and projects. Based on the subject assigned, the students can refine it by choosing from a variety of suggestions and by using a random subtopic generator. This helps students learn how to refine a subject so that it is more manageable for Internet research.
PersuadeStar
This free online application is designed to help students in grades 5-12 write an online persuasive essay. http://persuadestar.4teachers.org
Think Tank is designed to help students develop a Research Organizer (a list of topics and subtopics) for reports and projects. Based on the subject assigned, the students can refine it by choosing from a variety of suggestions and by using a random subtopic generator. This helps students learn how to refine a subject so that it is more manageable for Internet research. http://thinktank.4teachers.org/
Checklist of Focus Correction Areas
Create your own checklist. Choose from a menu or correction areas or create your own. http://pblchecklist.4teachers.org/
Thesis Generator http://mciu.org/%7Espjvweb/thesisgenerator.html
A+ Research and Writing A step-by-step guide for research and writing "help site" for high school students. http://www.ipl.org/div/aplus/
[Back to writing]
Editing
Guide to Grammar and Writing Suggestions, examples, quizzes, and links to help the writing process . http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/
Rewordify - Is one of the most interesting sites I've come across this year. This site allows students to enter text (or copy/paste) and then w/ a click of a button "rewordify" their sentence. This is a great way to learn how to paraphrase or even work on vocabulary by highlighting words.
Hemingway is a free tool designed to help you analyze your writing. Hemingway offers a bunch of information about the passage you've written or copied and pasted into the site. Hemingway highlights the parts of your writing that use passive voice, adverbs, and overly complex sentences. All of those factors are accounted for in generating a general readability score for your passage. Hemingway students can use the tool before exchanging papers with classmates for peer editing. Hemingway acts as a kind of "virtual peer" before the peer editing process. I would also have students use Hemingway before turning in their final drafts for a grade.
Every-Day Edit
Use Every-Day Edits to build language skills, test scores, and cultural literacy with students in grades 4 and above.
http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/archives/edit.shtml
Teaching Effective Peer-Editing Strategies
In this lesson, students use a three-step peer-editing process that consists of compliments, suggestions, and corrections.
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=786
Write On: Editing Activities
Develop the structural and creative skills necessary to produce written language that can be read and interpreted by various audiences. http://208.183.128.3/write/editing.html
The Goofs
Features an extensive collectrion of online and downloadable editing activities.
http://jc-schools.net/write/goofs/
Glencoe Online: Proofreading Practice
Practice correcting passages online for spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and usage.
Grades 6-8:
http://www.glencoe.com/sec/writerschoice/pp/mslessons/grade6/index.shtml
Grades 9-12:
http://www.glencoe.com/sec/writerschoice/pp/hslessons/grade9/index.shtml
Proofreading & Editing Tips
A compilation of advice from experienced proofreaders and editors.
http://www.lrcom.com/tips/proofreading_editing.htm
Thesis Builder
An online tool for developing persuasive essays. http://tommarch.com/electraguide/
Essay Prompts Numerous essay prompts for high school classes and college admission practice http://www.eduers.com/University/College_Admission_Essay_Topics.html
Essay Map
Online graphic organizer for 3 paragraph essay http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/essaymap/
Quotes.Net Source for quotes http://www.quotes.net
PowerPoint Presentations on Student Research
Topics include: Building Better Research, Collaboration, Plagerism and Putting the Pieces Together. http://ed.sc.gov/agency/offices/tech/ms/lms/page1360.html
Research Paper Organizer
Interactive guide to planning, researching, and writing a research paper. http://library.sasaustin.org/sasaustin/library/paperOrganizerUS.php
NoteStar
NoteStar is an Internet utility to assist in the preparation of research papers. Teachers and students can set up research projects with topics and sub-topics. Students may then take advantage of NoteStar's many features to collect and organize their notes and prepare their bibliography page. http://notestar.4teachers.org/
Think Tank Think Tank is designed to help students develop a Research Organizer (a list of topics and subtopics) for reports and projects. Based on the subject assigned, the students can refine it by choosing from a variety of suggestions and by using a random subtopic generator. This helps students learn how to refine a subject so that it is more manageable for Internet research.
PersuadeStar
This free online application is designed to help students in grades 5-12 write an online persuasive essay. http://persuadestar.4teachers.org
- Analysis of example essays
- An essay planning tool
- An essay writing space
- Student spelling feedback
- Source and bibliography information
- Records of how many times a student used the available options
Think Tank is designed to help students develop a Research Organizer (a list of topics and subtopics) for reports and projects. Based on the subject assigned, the students can refine it by choosing from a variety of suggestions and by using a random subtopic generator. This helps students learn how to refine a subject so that it is more manageable for Internet research. http://thinktank.4teachers.org/
Checklist of Focus Correction Areas
Create your own checklist. Choose from a menu or correction areas or create your own. http://pblchecklist.4teachers.org/
Thesis Generator http://mciu.org/%7Espjvweb/thesisgenerator.html
A+ Research and Writing A step-by-step guide for research and writing "help site" for high school students. http://www.ipl.org/div/aplus/
[Back to writing]
Editing
Guide to Grammar and Writing Suggestions, examples, quizzes, and links to help the writing process . http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/
Rewordify - Is one of the most interesting sites I've come across this year. This site allows students to enter text (or copy/paste) and then w/ a click of a button "rewordify" their sentence. This is a great way to learn how to paraphrase or even work on vocabulary by highlighting words.
Hemingway is a free tool designed to help you analyze your writing. Hemingway offers a bunch of information about the passage you've written or copied and pasted into the site. Hemingway highlights the parts of your writing that use passive voice, adverbs, and overly complex sentences. All of those factors are accounted for in generating a general readability score for your passage. Hemingway students can use the tool before exchanging papers with classmates for peer editing. Hemingway acts as a kind of "virtual peer" before the peer editing process. I would also have students use Hemingway before turning in their final drafts for a grade.
Every-Day Edit
Use Every-Day Edits to build language skills, test scores, and cultural literacy with students in grades 4 and above.
http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/archives/edit.shtml
Teaching Effective Peer-Editing Strategies
In this lesson, students use a three-step peer-editing process that consists of compliments, suggestions, and corrections.
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=786
Write On: Editing Activities
Develop the structural and creative skills necessary to produce written language that can be read and interpreted by various audiences. http://208.183.128.3/write/editing.html
The Goofs
Features an extensive collectrion of online and downloadable editing activities.
http://jc-schools.net/write/goofs/
Glencoe Online: Proofreading Practice
Practice correcting passages online for spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and usage.
Grades 6-8:
http://www.glencoe.com/sec/writerschoice/pp/mslessons/grade6/index.shtml
Grades 9-12:
http://www.glencoe.com/sec/writerschoice/pp/hslessons/grade9/index.shtml
Proofreading & Editing Tips
A compilation of advice from experienced proofreaders and editors.
http://www.lrcom.com/tips/proofreading_editing.htm
Poetry
Poetry4Kids: K-5. A vast collection of poetry. http://www.poetry4kids.com
Random Text Writing Prompt Generator This Google Sheet randomly pulls from a list of about 2,000 adjectives and 1,000 nouns to create over 2 million unique prompts. You can get a new set of 20 random prompts by refreshing the page in your browser, or by pressing Ctrl and R. You can get your own copy of the Sheet here. Random Text Writing Prompt Generator - Google Sheet link
RWT's Theme Poems interactive provides students with 32 pictures to use as the basis for writing short poems. To write a poem students launch the interactive then choose a theme. Within each of the five themes students will find related images. Once they choose an image students are prompted to write the words that come to mind as they look at the image. Students then create poems from those words. The finished product can be saved as a PDF and or emailed to a teacher from the RWT site.
ReadWorks is a free service that provides teachers with hundreds of lesson plans and more than two thousand reading non-fiction and fiction passages aligned to Common Core standards. It also includes poems and question sets. The collection is organized by grade level. In the collection you will find poems by Frost, Dickinson, Stevenson, and other notable poets.
Lexile scores are listed for each article along with grade levels and Common Core standards.
With a free ReadWorks account you can search for lessons and reading passages by grade level, lexile score, reading skill, subject area, and text type (fiction or non-fiction). In your ReadWorks account you can create digital binders of the lesson plans and reading passages that you want to use.
25 Great Ideas for Teaching Poetry
Poemhunter treasures are waiting for poem hunters. The Poemhunter app’s library has over 1.4 million poems from more than 100,000 poets, including Maya Angelou, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Langston Hughes, Khalil Gibran, and T. S. Eliot.
The Poem Farm is a resource for poems of all kinds by poet Amy Ludwig VanDerwater. Browse the Poetry Peeks section to peek into poetry creations in classrooms everywhere. Find poems sorted by topic. Beware, there is an extensive list of topics! Looking for poems using different techniques? Search through the site for mask poems, riddle poems, personification, and much more. Another interesting portion of the website is the dictionary hike. View and listen to a poem for each letter of the alphabet. One unique feature of the website is that the author includes additional information with each poem such as teaching techniques, thought process during the poem's creation, and other ideas for creating similar poetry. There are also some lesson plans to explore.
RWT's Theme Poems interactive provides students with 32 pictures to use as the basis for writing short poems. To write a poem students launch the interactive then choose a theme. Within each of the five themes students will find related images. Once they choose an image students are prompted to write the words that come to mind as they look at the image. Students then create poems from those words. The finished product can be saved as a PDF and or emailed to a teacher from the RWT site.
Unleashing Sorrow and Joy: Writing Poetry from History and Literature Explore different ways to incorporate poetry into history or literature classes in this teaching activity.
A reflection on the power of poetry to spark critical discussion and reflection on issues of inequality surrounding disaster response in the United States.
Using Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Dear Matafele Peinam,” 7th graders think about the sacred spaces in their lives and how they are affected by climate change.
Poetry of Defiance: How the Enslaved Resisted Through a mixer activity, students encounter how enslaved people resisted the brutal exploitation of slavery. The lesson culminates in a collective class poem highlighting the defiance of the enslaved.
Two fun poem patterns to try this in the spring! My students especially loved the one with the dice. Print them out or use as a TpT Easel Digital Activity!
Instant Poetry Forms http://ettcweb.lr.k12.nj.us/forms/newpoem.htm Instant Poetry Forms consists of more than sixty interactive literacy activities. Students can point, click and add words to the frame of a poem. With a quick click on the button below the form, the writer's words are magically added, completing each line. At that point, poets are invited to export their draft into a word processor for further revision and editing. An interactive poetry form finder on the website categorizes the forms by topic (or language skill
poets.org - The Academy of American Poets doesn't just organize National Poetry Month, their site also has poems, poetry lesson plans, and more.
Poetry for High School - Curated by Master's in library science and information technology student Brook Balentine-Alfino.
Poetry - Curated by primary school teacher Karen Waterman.
Giggle Poetry: Poetry Class The thirty-five poetry lessons at Giggle Poetry's Poetry Class are written by a variety of children's poets. Most focus on poetry starters, such as How to Write a "Mary Had a Little Something" Poem and How to Write a "Roses Are Red" Poem. http://www.gigglepoetry.com/poetryclass.aspx
Want more? Check out these shelves of tools created by members like you.
Poetry PromptsLooking for ideas to inspire creative writing? Try these!
HooplaKidz: This channel is dedicated to animated nursery rhymes and stories designed to entertain and educate children between the ages of 2 and 8.
Shel Silverstein Create poems similar to Shel's and download a poetry kit http://shelsilverstein.com/
Poetry Zone: How to Write Poems This is the complete text of Roger Stevens' 1997 children's book "How To Write Poems." It is directed to chldren 8-12 years old. http://www.poetryzone.ndirect.co.uk/howto.htm
Write Rhymes is a site that is perfect for students who are starting to write poetry that rhymes. The site is simple to use and allows teachers or students to write any word (or series of words) and then click on the word to find every rhyming possibility broken up into categories (nouns, verbs, etc.) http://www.writerhymes.com/
Poetry Zone: How to Write Poems This is the complete text of Roger Stevens' 1997 children's book "How To Write Poems." It is directed to chldren 8-12 years old. http://www.poetryzone.ndirect.co.uk/howto.htm
Fuzzy Funny Fuzzy funny poems to read http://www.fizzyfunnyfuzzy.com/
Poetry Lesson Plans: Lessons focus on appreciating poetry, reading, discussing and enjoying poems. http://www.favoritepoem.org/forteachers/lessonplans.html
Nursery Rhymes and Coordinating Activity Sheets Craft ideas , coloring sheets and fun pictures accompany these favorite nursery rhymes. http://www.first-school.ws/theme/nurseryrhymes.htm
Everywhere Help your students explore the power of language, look at the world with a fresh sense of wonder, and build reading and writing skills. These video segments, drawn from the PBS Poetry Everywhere series and produced in partnership with the Poetry Foundation, capture some of the voices of poetry, past and present.Find the collection at: http://www.teachersdomain.org/special/pe08-ex/
Funny Poems Barking Spiders (and other such stuff) Poetry: Poems written from a child's perspective, stories, tongue twisters, tips for budding authors, favorite quites and fill-in the blank poems. Beware of the music on each page. http://www.barkingspiderspoetry.com/
Fizzy Funny fun Poetry for Kids: Poet Gareth Lancaster's children's poems. Rated by readers. http://www.fizzyfunnyfuzzy.com/
Tranquillity is a tool for those who like writing poetry. it provides a clean interface for poetry writing, syllable count, comprehends rhyme scheme, and suggests rhyming words.
Children's Poetry Archive K - 8
Listen to poems read loud. Poems are searchable by form, theme, and poet. http://pbskids.org/curiousgeorge/
Ted Sheu - that Poetry Guy: Teacher section explains how to bring poetry to life in the classroom. Poetry section includes both audio and written works. http://www.poetryguy.com/
Rhymes - find rhyming words http://www.rhymes.net/
Looking for Poetry A poetry resource for secondary grades that includes poetry finders, lyrics, and thinking about poetry. http://mciu.org/%7Espjvweb/poetrypath.html
Poetry Aloud: A directory of poetry read aloud online. http://www.gpc.edu/~shale/humanities/composition/handouts/poetryaloud.html
Magnolia A list of great links to full-text, online poetery resources http://library.msstate.edu/magnolia/news/poetry.htm
Poetry 180 A 9- 12 site from the Library of Congress which provides a poem-a-day to be read aloud in schools http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
Poetry Writing Unit: Lessons with examples. Scroll down to the middle of the page to see the lessons. http://volweb.utk.edu/school/bedford/harrisms/spotlight.htm
PBS Poetry Site: Videos and reading of poets http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/poetry/
Poetry Pages http://www.theatlantic.com/index/fiction
Scholastic: Writing with Writers: Poetry Writing Join Jack Prelutsky, Karla Kuskin and Jean Marzollo as they share poetry writing tips and techniques in three Scholastic workshops. Each poet's workshop includes samples of their work, warm-up exercises, the poet's biography and the opportunity for students to submit poems for possible publication online. Prelutsky's lessons are geared to students in grades one to four. Marzaollo's riddle writing project targets grades two to five. Kuskin's tips are for older writers between the grades of four and eight. http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/poetry/
Poetry Teachers: Poetry Class: How to teach poetry, poetry theater, and poetry activities http://www.poetryteachers.com/poetclass/poetclass.html
World Class Poetry: Poetry writing Portal http://www.world-class-poetry.com/How-To-Write-A-Poem.html
Poetry Foundation is a wonderful web resource for anyone interested in, studying, or just wanting to enjoy poetry. The site has information, tons of poems, searchable content, interviews and information on poets, and more. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/
Poetry4Kids: K-5. A vast collection of poetry. http://www.poetry4kids.com
Random Text Writing Prompt Generator This Google Sheet randomly pulls from a list of about 2,000 adjectives and 1,000 nouns to create over 2 million unique prompts. You can get a new set of 20 random prompts by refreshing the page in your browser, or by pressing Ctrl and R. You can get your own copy of the Sheet here. Random Text Writing Prompt Generator - Google Sheet link
RWT's Theme Poems interactive provides students with 32 pictures to use as the basis for writing short poems. To write a poem students launch the interactive then choose a theme. Within each of the five themes students will find related images. Once they choose an image students are prompted to write the words that come to mind as they look at the image. Students then create poems from those words. The finished product can be saved as a PDF and or emailed to a teacher from the RWT site.
ReadWorks is a free service that provides teachers with hundreds of lesson plans and more than two thousand reading non-fiction and fiction passages aligned to Common Core standards. It also includes poems and question sets. The collection is organized by grade level. In the collection you will find poems by Frost, Dickinson, Stevenson, and other notable poets.
Lexile scores are listed for each article along with grade levels and Common Core standards.
With a free ReadWorks account you can search for lessons and reading passages by grade level, lexile score, reading skill, subject area, and text type (fiction or non-fiction). In your ReadWorks account you can create digital binders of the lesson plans and reading passages that you want to use.
25 Great Ideas for Teaching Poetry
Poemhunter treasures are waiting for poem hunters. The Poemhunter app’s library has over 1.4 million poems from more than 100,000 poets, including Maya Angelou, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Langston Hughes, Khalil Gibran, and T. S. Eliot.
The Poem Farm is a resource for poems of all kinds by poet Amy Ludwig VanDerwater. Browse the Poetry Peeks section to peek into poetry creations in classrooms everywhere. Find poems sorted by topic. Beware, there is an extensive list of topics! Looking for poems using different techniques? Search through the site for mask poems, riddle poems, personification, and much more. Another interesting portion of the website is the dictionary hike. View and listen to a poem for each letter of the alphabet. One unique feature of the website is that the author includes additional information with each poem such as teaching techniques, thought process during the poem's creation, and other ideas for creating similar poetry. There are also some lesson plans to explore.
RWT's Theme Poems interactive provides students with 32 pictures to use as the basis for writing short poems. To write a poem students launch the interactive then choose a theme. Within each of the five themes students will find related images. Once they choose an image students are prompted to write the words that come to mind as they look at the image. Students then create poems from those words. The finished product can be saved as a PDF and or emailed to a teacher from the RWT site.
Unleashing Sorrow and Joy: Writing Poetry from History and Literature Explore different ways to incorporate poetry into history or literature classes in this teaching activity.
A reflection on the power of poetry to spark critical discussion and reflection on issues of inequality surrounding disaster response in the United States.
Using Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Dear Matafele Peinam,” 7th graders think about the sacred spaces in their lives and how they are affected by climate change.
Poetry of Defiance: How the Enslaved Resisted Through a mixer activity, students encounter how enslaved people resisted the brutal exploitation of slavery. The lesson culminates in a collective class poem highlighting the defiance of the enslaved.
Two fun poem patterns to try this in the spring! My students especially loved the one with the dice. Print them out or use as a TpT Easel Digital Activity!
Instant Poetry Forms http://ettcweb.lr.k12.nj.us/forms/newpoem.htm Instant Poetry Forms consists of more than sixty interactive literacy activities. Students can point, click and add words to the frame of a poem. With a quick click on the button below the form, the writer's words are magically added, completing each line. At that point, poets are invited to export their draft into a word processor for further revision and editing. An interactive poetry form finder on the website categorizes the forms by topic (or language skill
poets.org - The Academy of American Poets doesn't just organize National Poetry Month, their site also has poems, poetry lesson plans, and more.
Poetry for High School - Curated by Master's in library science and information technology student Brook Balentine-Alfino.
Poetry - Curated by primary school teacher Karen Waterman.
Giggle Poetry: Poetry Class The thirty-five poetry lessons at Giggle Poetry's Poetry Class are written by a variety of children's poets. Most focus on poetry starters, such as How to Write a "Mary Had a Little Something" Poem and How to Write a "Roses Are Red" Poem. http://www.gigglepoetry.com/poetryclass.aspx
- poets.org - The Academy of American Poets doesn't just organize National Poetry Month, their site also has poems, poetry lesson plans, and more.
- Acrostic Poem - Learn how to write acrostic poems, where the first, last or other letters in a line spell out a particular word or phrase.
- Magnetry - Craft poems using this iPad version of word magnets, then spruce them up with customizable colors, backgrounds, and digital stickers.
- Unite for Literacy - A vast library of free ebooks for children, including audio narration and multi-lingual support.
Want more? Check out these shelves of tools created by members like you.
- Poetry for High School - Curated by Master's in library science and information technology student Brook Balentine-Alfino.
- Poetry - Curated by primary school teacher Karen Waterman.
Poetry PromptsLooking for ideas to inspire creative writing? Try these!
- Create a “Poetree”
- Blackout Poetry
- Popcorn Poetry (Imagination Soup)
- List Poems (Imagination Soup)
- Limericks: silly 5-line poems (Scholastic)
HooplaKidz: This channel is dedicated to animated nursery rhymes and stories designed to entertain and educate children between the ages of 2 and 8.
Shel Silverstein Create poems similar to Shel's and download a poetry kit http://shelsilverstein.com/
Poetry Zone: How to Write Poems This is the complete text of Roger Stevens' 1997 children's book "How To Write Poems." It is directed to chldren 8-12 years old. http://www.poetryzone.ndirect.co.uk/howto.htm
Write Rhymes is a site that is perfect for students who are starting to write poetry that rhymes. The site is simple to use and allows teachers or students to write any word (or series of words) and then click on the word to find every rhyming possibility broken up into categories (nouns, verbs, etc.) http://www.writerhymes.com/
Poetry Zone: How to Write Poems This is the complete text of Roger Stevens' 1997 children's book "How To Write Poems." It is directed to chldren 8-12 years old. http://www.poetryzone.ndirect.co.uk/howto.htm
Fuzzy Funny Fuzzy funny poems to read http://www.fizzyfunnyfuzzy.com/
Poetry Lesson Plans: Lessons focus on appreciating poetry, reading, discussing and enjoying poems. http://www.favoritepoem.org/forteachers/lessonplans.html
Nursery Rhymes and Coordinating Activity Sheets Craft ideas , coloring sheets and fun pictures accompany these favorite nursery rhymes. http://www.first-school.ws/theme/nurseryrhymes.htm
- Favorite Nursery Rhymes Nursery rhymes help kids with concepts such as assimilation, humor and caring; this page has many traditionally loved rhymes. http://www.dltk-teach.com/rhymes/index.htm#Nursery%20Rhymes
- Sing Along Nursery Rhymes Classic nursery rhymes with music, lyrics, videos and alternate wording choices. http://bussongs.com/nursery_rhyme_songs.php
Everywhere Help your students explore the power of language, look at the world with a fresh sense of wonder, and build reading and writing skills. These video segments, drawn from the PBS Poetry Everywhere series and produced in partnership with the Poetry Foundation, capture some of the voices of poetry, past and present.Find the collection at: http://www.teachersdomain.org/special/pe08-ex/
Funny Poems Barking Spiders (and other such stuff) Poetry: Poems written from a child's perspective, stories, tongue twisters, tips for budding authors, favorite quites and fill-in the blank poems. Beware of the music on each page. http://www.barkingspiderspoetry.com/
Fizzy Funny fun Poetry for Kids: Poet Gareth Lancaster's children's poems. Rated by readers. http://www.fizzyfunnyfuzzy.com/
Tranquillity is a tool for those who like writing poetry. it provides a clean interface for poetry writing, syllable count, comprehends rhyme scheme, and suggests rhyming words.
Children's Poetry Archive K - 8
Listen to poems read loud. Poems are searchable by form, theme, and poet. http://pbskids.org/curiousgeorge/
Ted Sheu - that Poetry Guy: Teacher section explains how to bring poetry to life in the classroom. Poetry section includes both audio and written works. http://www.poetryguy.com/
Rhymes - find rhyming words http://www.rhymes.net/
Looking for Poetry A poetry resource for secondary grades that includes poetry finders, lyrics, and thinking about poetry. http://mciu.org/%7Espjvweb/poetrypath.html
Poetry Aloud: A directory of poetry read aloud online. http://www.gpc.edu/~shale/humanities/composition/handouts/poetryaloud.html
Magnolia A list of great links to full-text, online poetery resources http://library.msstate.edu/magnolia/news/poetry.htm
Poetry 180 A 9- 12 site from the Library of Congress which provides a poem-a-day to be read aloud in schools http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
Poetry Writing Unit: Lessons with examples. Scroll down to the middle of the page to see the lessons. http://volweb.utk.edu/school/bedford/harrisms/spotlight.htm
PBS Poetry Site: Videos and reading of poets http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/poetry/
Poetry Pages http://www.theatlantic.com/index/fiction
Scholastic: Writing with Writers: Poetry Writing Join Jack Prelutsky, Karla Kuskin and Jean Marzollo as they share poetry writing tips and techniques in three Scholastic workshops. Each poet's workshop includes samples of their work, warm-up exercises, the poet's biography and the opportunity for students to submit poems for possible publication online. Prelutsky's lessons are geared to students in grades one to four. Marzaollo's riddle writing project targets grades two to five. Kuskin's tips are for older writers between the grades of four and eight. http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/poetry/
Poetry Teachers: Poetry Class: How to teach poetry, poetry theater, and poetry activities http://www.poetryteachers.com/poetclass/poetclass.html
World Class Poetry: Poetry writing Portal http://www.world-class-poetry.com/How-To-Write-A-Poem.html
Poetry Foundation is a wonderful web resource for anyone interested in, studying, or just wanting to enjoy poetry. The site has information, tons of poems, searchable content, interviews and information on poets, and more. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/
How Digital Literature Circles Help Readers Create, Compose and Connect
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Article: Teachers leverage students' interest in current events to build higher-level reading and writing skills
4 Steps to Get Middle School Students Excited About Revision
Writing Mini-Lessons: Strategies to Help Students Write Longer, More Developed Pieces