English Language Arts
Reading Skills
Zinc Learning Labs, Online Reading
Elevate learning with literacy.
Ben Franklin Main Idea Activities
Modules designed to test comprehension of a news story. Link opens to Instructor page about the modules.
Analogy Challenge from Sadlier-Oxford
Try to complete the analogies in a race against time.
Analogies Jeopardy from Quia
Foreign Words and Phrases from Fact Monster
Name that Literary Element from Glencoe
Take a virtual ride through the literary cosmos in this interactive game designed to test your knowledge of the literary elements in your book. View a definition on your screen and then click on its matching literary element from a choice of terms floating through space. Race against the clock or challenge a partner to play!
Story Elements Questioning Cards
Great for independent work after reading a book
Movie clips that reflect theme
Rooting Out Words from Fun Brain
Flip A Chip from Read Write Think
Students flip two chips to mix and match four word parts and make four words. Students then insert the four words into a paragraph, using context clues to determine where each word belongs. After each exercise, students can print their work to check whether they placed the four words in the paragraph correctly.
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.
Homographs (multiple meaning words) Jeopardy from Quia
BigBot from Merriam-Webster
Students must choose synonyms or antonyms from word list. Can be done with clickers in verbal mode.
Up an Down Words from Merriam Webster
In this activity, students learn word combinations and idioms. In a ladder sequence, students find the second half of a word combo by reading its definition and adding the second word.That, in turn, becomes the first part of the next answer. The goal is to get to the 7th word combo whose second half started the game. Clickable hints assist students with the first letter missing word. You are able to click on the clues (to get more letters) as often as needed to solve the puzzle. There are new puzzles every weekday and archived puzzles from previous dates. There are two difficulty levels.
Top Ten Things to Think About Before Post Poster from Flowcabulary
Making Text to Text Connections Graphic Organizer
Newsela, Online Reading
Newslea takes news articles from around the world and rewrites them at up to five different lexile levels and in Spanish.
Over 50 YouTube Videos of favorite authors
Myths and Legends
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
Literacy Activities from wicked
Learn about how words and pictures are put together to make our newspapers.
Don't Buy It from PBS Kids
Get Media Smart by learning about advertising, buying smart, entertainment, and more.
Poetry
Shel Silverstein: The Official Site for Kids
Great Site. Many activities including "Let's Have Some Fun" section you can print the Cuttin' Kate Drawing Book, make your own bookmark, solve poetry puzzles and more. In the Memorize Tomorrow section, animated excerpts from Shel's books in which he narrates some of his poems. Teacher activities also available.
Poetry Activity from BBC Bitesize Education
Students read poems and answer multiple choice questions about the poetry. Revision and quiz also available.
Explore the Power of Language from Poetry Everywhere
Provides 10 videos, as well as essays and lessons, to help students explore the power of language and build reading and writing skills. The videos feature seminal voices of poetry, past and present, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Seamus Heaney, Marie Howe, and Yusef Komunyakaa.
The Music in Poetry from the Smithsonian
Students are introduced to the rhythms of poetry. The focus in on two poetic forms that originated as forms of song: the ballad stanza, found throughout British and American literature, and the blues stanzas of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. The exercises take poetry off the page and put it into terms of movement, physical space and, finally, music. At a special Web page, students can listen to musical ballads and blues from the catalog of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. The ballads include early recordings of Bob Dylan and Suzanne Vega. The blues is heard in regional styles and as an element of early jazz.
Poetry Idea Engine from Scholastic
Create a Diamonte Poem from Read, Write, Think
Shape Poems from Read,Write, Think
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
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.
ReadWriteThink Notetaker Useful for a wide variety of reading and writing activities, this outlining tool allows students to organize up to five levels of information, choosing bullets, Roman numerals, or letters.
This website has a daily paragraph for editing. You may need to set your screen carefully as the answer is directly below.
Great quick video to teach students how to choose the best search terms
Great game that teaches about plagiarism
Flocabulary, Transition Words Rap Video
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
Students make and play interactive stories with no programming required.
Research
How to Google Like a Pro, YouTube Video
Online Resources and Tools
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.
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.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.
Wordsmyth, Online Dictionary
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.
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
The Interactive Comparison and Contrast Guide
Includes an overview, definitions and examples. The Organizing a Paper section includes details on whole-to-whole (block), point-by-point and similarities-to-differences structures. In addition, the Guide explains how graphic organizers are used for comparison and contrast, provides tips for using transitions between ideas in comparison and contrast essays, and includes a checklist, which matches an accompanying rubric.
Comparison and Contrast Guide from Read, Write, Think
The Comparison and Contrast Guide outlines the characteristics of the genre and provides direct instruction on the methods of organizing, gathering ideas, and writing comparison and contrast essays.
Great Speeches from The History Place
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.