Reading Skills
Understanding Setting, Plot, and Theme
Read a short story. Then read each sentence and decide if it is part of the setting, plot or theme.
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.
Story Elements Questioning Cards
Great for independent work after reading a book
TV411 Tune into Learning
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.
Online interactive tutorial and quiz
Students must pick the correct meaning of a word in context. They find the answer number and then throw a pie at a duck with the same number.
Test Tutor from Harcourt
Students are given passages to read and then asked to compare and contrast.
Fact Monster Analogy of the Day
One analogy of the day, but teachers or students can click on previous day or next day.
It's Greek to Me from Scholastic
alliteration, similes and metaphors, personification, connotation and imagery quiz
Figurative Language Games from Spelling City (need not log in)
Click on Featured Games for various games
Free video segments that capture some of the voices of poetry, past and present.
Myths and Legends PowerPoints
World Myths and Legends in Art
On this site, created by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, your students can explore myths and legends from around the world, with the great works of art, in-depth interpretations and interactive features.
Mythology Puzzles from MyVocabulary.com
This site is not the most user friendly, but scroll down for puzzles and other resources.
Myths Brainstorming Machine from Scholastic
Writing with Writers, Myths Writing Workshop with Jane Yolen
A Hero's Journey from Read, Write, Think
Short scripts and plays from the Zoom television show.
Making Text Connections to Self Connections Graphic Organizer
Making Text to Text Connections Graphic Organizer
Making Text to World Connections Graphic Organizer
Grammar and Editing Skills
There are ten rooms in the temple, and each one is full of tricks and traps. Students need to use their English grammar and vocabulary to get through the rooms. Each room that they complete gives them one word of the password sentence that they need in order to finish the game.
Students must read a passage, find, and edit all errors.
This website has a daily paragraph for editing. You may need to set your screen carefully as the answer is directly below.
Different levels. Students must find the error in a sentence. They must then choose an appropriate paintball to correct the sentence. Website will ask you to register. Choose maybe later and game will start.
Writing
Online How To Paper from Holt, Rinehart, and Winston
This website gives an example of a how to paper. Students can click on the different parts for its label and an example.
Instructions for a Process from Holt, Rinehart, and Winston
This website gives an example of a how to paper. Students can click on the different parts for its label and an example.
Persuasive Letter from from Holt, Rinehart, and Winston
Great quick video to teach students how to choose the best search terms
Great game that teaches about plagiarism.
Students make and play interactive stories with no programming required.
Research
How to Google Like a Pro, YouTube Video
Online Resources and Tools
Text Collage, Creates totally random works of art, composed of text and based on varying emotions. It chooses an emotion, then displays associated words and dynamically created sentences in random fonts, sizes and places.
Create a graphic novel online
Daily news stories, with the same one edited several times for different reading levels. The stories also have self-scoring quizzes and provide "critical thinking" questions that students can respond to in the comments.
Newsela, Online Reading
Newslea takes news articles from around the world and rewrites them at up to five different lexile levels and in Spanish.
Zinc Learning Labs, Online Reading
Elevate learning with literacy.
VocabGrabber is a free service offered by the folks at Visual Thesaurus (a fee-based service). VocabGrabber makes it easy to generate vocabulary lists from any text that you can digitally copy. To use Vocab Grabber simply paste any chunk of text, up to 200,000 characters, into the Vocab Grabber. The VocabGrabber then sorts, and places in a word cloud, the most frequently used words in that text. Words are also sorted into academic categories like Social Studies, Math, Science, and Literature. Click on any of the words in the word cloud to see the definition displayed on the right side of the screen.
Wordsmyth, Online Dictionary
Word Central from Merriam Webster
Reprogrammed for superior word power and language fun. Introducing…Alphabot, the word-spelling robot hosts the latest amazing word game and challenges spellers of all ages. Great for listening and spelling skills. ESL students.
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.
Cite This For Me is a tool designed to help students correctly format reference lists or citation pages. To create a reference list using Cite This For Me students simply need to fill in the required information in each box, sort them alphabetically, and download the formatted reference page. Cite This For Me provides formatting not only printed materials and websites, but also for things like podcasts, online videos, and even email correspondence.
refDot is a Google Chrome extension that could be very helpful for keeping track of and formatting references for use in bibliographies. Whenever you're viewing a website, an online book, an online journal, or a news article just click the refDot icon in your browser to open a window into which you enter all of information you need for a bibliography. For example if you were viewing a blog post on Free Technology for Teachers that you wanted to reference in a bibliography, click on refDot and the pop-up box will prompt you to enter the date of access, url, title, and year.
How to Create a Works Cited Using Google Docs
Create Storyboards, free and premium versions
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.