English Language Arts
Reading Skills
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.
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
Sprat's Adventures from BBC
This is a three part adventure in which Digger and his gang must solve the mystery of the stolen statue. Start at Part 1. When finished with Part 1, click on the Thieves. Students must use different reading skills to solve the mystery. Part 1 - comprehension, inferring, sequencing. Part 2 - idioms, inferences, sequencing. Part 3 - Greek and Latin prefixes and summary.
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.
Analogies Jeopardy from Quia
Analogies from Sadlier-Oxford
Fact Monster Analogy of the Day
One analogy of the day, but teachers or students can click on previous day or next day.
10 Foreign Words Used in English with their meaningsYGoy
Foreign Words and Phrases from Fact Monster
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
Short Circuit Prefixes and Suffixes from Maggie's Adventures on Scholastic
A Feast of Homonyms from Quia
Word Confusion from FunBrain
Two Levels, Choose Hard for this grade level
Robobee from Merriam-Webster
Students must read a sentence and then fly a bee to the pick the correct homophone to fill in the blank. Some high level words are used.
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.
Character Scrapbook from Scholastic
Use this reader's response activity to analyze the characters in any book. Print and collect the scrapbook pages.
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.
Seaside Postcard from Crickweb
A humorous seaside writing activity. By annotating the scene dialogue can be explored and characteristics shown through thought bubbles.
Making Text to Text Connections Graphic Organizer
Poetry
Poetry Idea Engine from Scholastic
Works on iPad also
Making Text to Text Connections Graphic Organizer
Refrigerator Magnet Poetry Google Draw
You will have to log into your Google Account to access
Persuasive
Big Babies, Instructions from BBC
Writing Instructions Archived Activity from BBC
Don't Buy It from PBS Kids
Get Media Smart by learning about advertising, buying smart, entertainment, and more.
Grammar and Editing
This website has a daily paragraph for editing. You may need to set your screen carefully as the answer is directly below.
Research
How to Google Like a Pro, YouTube Video
Online Resources and Tools
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.
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.
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
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.
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 quick video to teach students how to choose the best search terms
Great game that teaches about plagiarism.
How to Create a Works Cited Using Google Docs
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.
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.
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.
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.
Students make and play interactive stories with no programming required.