10-12 Language
As we navigate this uncharted time, it is important that we continue to engage our children and students in daily literacy. Some ways to engage in daily literacy can include:
- Listening to reading every day. This can come in the form of the teacher or parent reading to the student, or listening to books read aloud online (i.e. Audible).
- Remember to continue to encourage independent student reading when possible.
- Provide students the opportunity to have a choice and voice in what they are thinking about, reading, and writing.
- We want to provide our students with opportunities to share their learning with authentic audiences. This can look like reading or writing to a family member, responding to a favourite author or celebrity, or to a camera for a YouTube video they can share with their peers.
Learning in this new environment is not always going to go smoothly and that is ok. We are all learning together. Below are some resources to support you in supporting daily literacy work.
Independent Reading
Kids everywhere can instantly stream an incredible collection of stories, including titles across six different languages, that will help them continue dreaming, learning, and just being kids .https://stories.audible.com/start-listen
Capstone Interactive
Features nearly 5000 titles with interactive features. It provides text highlighting, audio support, the ability to customize book lists, and educator support. Free access is available until May 31st.
- Direct access: LINK
- Username: elearning20 Password: canadatrial
Research
This site is has a resource search, programs of study, T4T courses, & much more. This site was designed and developed to assist teachers and students in Alberta locate and utilize digital learning and teaching resources produced by the Ministry of Education.
Access for Rocky View Students:
- Username: LA53
- Password 4487
Teachers need to create a teacher account using their certificate number to see locked resources.
Use this resource to access more than 141 000 encyclopedia articles on a wide array of topics, educational videos, images, magazine articles, learning games, and more through three age-appropriate interfaces—Elementary, Middle and High. Read-aloud features (with highlighting text) and text translation are available for every article. Image Quest has been embedded to provide access to thousands of copyright friendly, related images.
Access is through the Online Reference Center using Learn Alberta Username: LA53 and password: 4487
CommonLit is a nonprofit education technology organization dedicated to ensuring that all students graduate with the reading, writing, communication, and problem-solving skills they need to be successful in college and beyond. Free reading activities and digital tools for at-home learning are available.
An online resource that provides up-to-date content that engages students on topics they care about and adjusts reading levels based on individual student need. Subject specific content and activities in ELA, social studies, and science provide teachers with all the content they need to build background knowledge and critical skills for students.
Independent Learning
At Crash Course, we believe that high quality educational videos should be available to everyone for free. The Crash Course team has produced more than 15 courses to date, and these videos accompany high school and college level classes ranging from the humanities to the sciences. Crash Course transforms the traditional textbook model by presenting information in a fast-paced format, enhancing the learning experience.
With hundreds of millions of views on our YouTube channel, Crash Course has a worldwide audience in and out of classrooms. While the show is an immensely helpful tool for students and teachers, it also has a large viewership of casual learners who seek out online educational content independently. It has changed attitudes towards education by creating a community of learners who are looking for more than just help passing a test. We hope Crash Course is useful to you, and thanks for watching!
The Real Time Curriculum Project is comprised of a series of "minute projects", each focused on a relevant current event. Minute Project #1 is focused on the COVID-19 / coronavirus pandemic. Check in daily and follow along @LearnMinute as we connect you to content to engage & empower educators AND students.
Fostering curiosity and a passion for lifelong learning, this curated collection of activities can be adapted for students in grades 6-12 in a remote learning environment. Explore the planet through interactives and short lessons or take a deeper dive into a subject area with a complete unit.
Teacher Resources
Online Interdisciplinary Resources
Actively Learn is a web-based reading platform that helps students read deeply and think critically, with thousands of texts and associated instruction in ELA, Science, and Social Studies. Similar to Newsela, this platform is very useful in that it has curated text sets of resources around topic, themes, genre, etc that are available at different reading access points for teachers to then embed into their teaching.
CommonLit’s Text Sets cover a range of literary movements, historical periods, and STEM topics. These text sets come with a range of literary and nonfiction lessons that span many grade levels. Each text set has a short introduction to the topic and you can choose the texts that are a best fit for your students. CommonLit’s Novel Sets are a group of texts on CommonLit that supplementally support popular books read in Middle and High schools. These novel sets include non-fiction texts to build background knowledge and literary texts that deal with similar themes.
Teach and Learn With The Times: Resources for Bringing the World Into Your Classroom. The Learning Network publishes about 1,000 teaching resources each school year, all based on using Times content — articles, essays, images, videos, graphics and podcasts — as teaching tools across subject areas. Most of our resources are free (only our lesson plans are limited to five per month for nonsubscribers).
TeenBookCloud is an online database of eBooks and educator resources perfect for middle school and high school. Includes a robust selection of Graphic Novels, Enhanced Novels, eBooks, classic literature, National Geographic videos, educator resources, and audiobooks.
At its heart, Open Library is a catalog. The project began in November 2007 and has been inhaling catalog records from some of the biggest libraries in the world ever since. We have well over 20 million edition records online, provide access to 1.7 million scanned versions of books, and link to external sources like WorldCat and Amazon when we can. The secondary goal is to get you as close to the actual document you're looking for as we can, whether that is a scanned version courtesy of the Internet Archive, or a link to Powell's where you can purchase your own copy
Smithsonianmag.com places a Smithsonian lens on the world, looking at the topics and subject matters researched, studied and exhibited by the Smithsonian Institution—science, history, art, popular culture and innovation—and chronicling them every day for our diverse readership.
Thinking Strategies Placemat and Website. The Thinking Strategies Placemat provides a visual of 5 key steps in a lesson and unit planning that reflects the principles of effective instruction, formative assessment and literacy, numeracy and competency development.