English Language Arts
Reading Skills
Rooting Out Words from FunBrain
Help Remainder the Dog gather enough mushrooms to sell at the market by uncovering the roots of words. (three categories, several difficulty levels)
Eye on Idioms from Read, Write, Think
Students are given a sentence missing an idiom. They must choose the correct answer from a list. There is a picture on page. Students are asked to write the meaning of the idiom and use the idiom in a sentence. Students may print or get another example.
Guess using riddles - infer what is being described by the clues you read
This is a short activity, but covers some good information.
Character Trading Cards from Read, Write, Think
The interactive Character Trading Cards tool is a fun and useful way for students to explore a character in a book that they are reading or as a prewriting exercise when creating characters for original stories.
What's the Big Idea from Harcourt School Publishing
Students must choose the main idea from a passage, then using letters (like hangman) solve a riddle.
Fact or Opinion? (quiz 1) - a Quia quiz
Fact or Opinion? (quiz 2) - a Quia quiz
Activities include passages (reading level pretty high) to read and determine summary questions, main idea and details, and categorizing main ideas
Download pdf files and use on interactive whiteboards
Prefixes hold the key to building the castle and making it light up.
Type the root, suffix and or prefix to create a Fish Tank.
Fun game to test your knowledge of prefixes and suffixes and use the word in a sentence. You can play by yourself or against a classmate.
Prefixes and Their Meanings pdf
Paraphrasing from BrainPop
Reading Short Stories Graphic Organizer from Freeology
Elements of a Story by learner.org
An interactive Web site where students can learn about different literary "ingredients" that make up a story. After watching and listening to an interactive version of "Cinderella," students will learn about various elements that are common to all stories: setting, characters, plot, exposition, conflict, climax, and resolution.
Five Elements of a Story from flocabulary
This song covers the five main elements of a story: setting, plot, characters, conflict and theme. Whether you’re studying a short story, a novel, an epic poem, a play or a film, if you don’t find these five elements, you’re not looking hard enough. With a catchy chorus that’s hard to forget, this “five elements of a short story” rap will get you or your students
Literary Elements Mapping by Read, Write, Think
This site allows teachers to create graphic and fill in graphic organizers about any story. With a projector, students can watch and copy on their own paper, includes Character Map, Conflict Map, Resolution Map, and Setting Map.
Plot Diagram from Read, Write, Think
The Plot Diagram is an organizational tool focusing on a pyramid or triangular shape, which is used to map the events in a story. This mapping of plot structure allows readers and writers to visualize the key features of stories.
Multigenre Mapper from Read, Write, Think
This interactive invites students to create original multigenre, multimodal works—one drawing and three written texts. The tool asks students to name the genres for each section.
Multigenre Mapper Planning Sheet
Making Text to Text Connections Graphic Organizer
Making Text Connections to Self Connections Graphic Organizer
Making Text to Text Connections Graphic Organizer
Making Text to World Connections Graphic Organizer
Doodle Splash - This activity challenges students to represent ideas from stories in a visual way, summarize the text, and then think about how the picture and the ideas connect.
Book Talks, Discussion Guides, and Video BookTalks from Scholastic
Poetry
Practice some basic poetry terms with this graphic organizer.
A template for this classic poem.
Figurative Language Games from Spelling City (need not log in)
Click on Featured Games for various games
Alliteration Sentences from BBC
Refrigerator Magnet Poetry Google Draw
You will have to log into your Google Account to access
Grammar Skills
Noun Dunk from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
This fun basketball game has students choose whether the word on the basketball is a common noun, proper noun or not a noun at all. To gain points, they must sink the basket with the correct choice.
This site has limited free things, but the free stuff is pretty good. At the top of the page are all parts of speech characters in circles. Clicking on any character brings up definitions, examples, and many uses. There is a book about nouns and one free game links at the bottom of page.
Know Your Nouns Jeopardy Game from Quia
Thanks Joann Lira for this site
Grammar Blast from Houghton Mifflin
Multiple choice quizzes arranged by grade level over various grammar topics. (clickers in verbal mode)
Go for Grammar Gold for Harcourt
Multiple Choice quizzes covering various grammar skills (could use clickers in verbal mode).
Grammar Practice Park from Harcourt
Play games to practice skills including sentence types, verbs, nouns, punctuation, etc.
Word Cluster Graphic Organizer from Freeology
Like flashcard only better. This page has space to write the vocabulary word, synonyms, a sentence and an illustration for each word.
Students must create sentences from mixed up words, find the correct punctuation, and make it more interesting.
Students must read a passage, find, and edit all errors.
Spelling Skills
British Site, Spellingframe includes all the words - both statutory and the example words - from the National Curriculum for Spelling for Year 2 to Year 6. Choose a spelling rule and each word is read aloud and provided within a sentence for context.
Research and Online Resources
Cornell Notes Graphic Organizer from Freeology
The main ideas go on the left and the details go in the larger box on the right.
Research Notes Graphic Organizer from Freeology
Use this sheet instead of note cards for research paper writing. There is space for the note subheading, page number, source number and note.
Basic Steps to Creating a Research Paper
This site does not have interactive activities, but has great tips for parents and students on research and creating a project.
Create Storyboards, free and premium versions
Online Sources from BrainPop
Movie, Online quiz, and Actiivities for classroom use. Must have your school log in.
An interactive dictionary from Merriam-Webster and QA International. From the image to the word and its definition, the Visual Dictionary Online is an all-in-one reference. A quick glance at the index is all it takes to connect words with images. Or students can explore the 15 major themes to access more than 6,000 images and see words like never before. The themes offer a variety of engaging, browsable topics. Additional features include a Game of the Week, played by associating words with images, and audio pronunciations spoken by real voices.
Visuwords, Online Graphical Dictionary
Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate. Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections. It's a dictionary! It's a thesaurus! Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists. The online dictionary is available wherever there’s an internet connection. No membership required.
Newsela Elementary, Online Reading
Newslea takes news articles from around the world and rewrites them at up to five different lexile levels and in Spanish.
Word Booster, Chrome Extension
Gives you a list of words you are likely to look up in the dictionary as far as the given text is concerned, guesses a good dictionary definition for the words along with example sentences. And finally, it also makes a quiz for the words using both the definitions and example sentences, plus answer key.
Enter a noun into this website and get a range of words to help you describe it. Superb for creative or descriptive writing projects.