TEACHER RESOURCES
ELA TEACHING RESOURCES
LESSON PLANNING & CURRICULUM IDEAS
http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/
This is the NCTE teachers resources website. They have hundreds of standards-based lesson plans that were written and educators using sound instructional practices. This is a good place to find ideas.
www.neate.org/neate-lessons NEATE is an organization that brings together and provides resources to help ELA teachers. Their website provides lessons, curriculum and text selection ideas to veteran and novice teachers, hosts writing contests for students, and sponsors a poet of the year contest. In short, NEATE supports English teachers throughout the region.
https://eduref.org/lessons/language-arts
The National Council for Open Education has an ELA lesson plan resources page. Not all of their lesson plans are meaningful, but teachers can cull some good ideas from them.
https://cptv.pbslearningmedia.org/subjects/english-language-arts-and-literacy/
PBS has collected these standards-aligned ELA resources for students in grade K-12. Teachers will find lesson ideas for reading, writing, literature, informational text, reading foundation skills, speaking and listening and composition skills.
This website provides ideas for skill-based and content-based ELA lessons grades K-12, featuring lesson plans, teaching materials, and professional learning resources on various topics and categories.
Free Texts
ListenwiseELA is a bank of lessons based on podcasts developed for ELA teachers that include content based on current events and listening comprehension quizzes. Assessment reports can be generated by listening skills (inference, main idea, etc.) Audio files can be shared to Google Classroom. Lexile audio is measured on every podcast. Lessons are Standards-aligned and easily differentiated. And, “close” listening with language practice and tiered vocabulary resources are included. This platform is compatible with Schoology and Canvas.
A free library of over 60,000 eBooks. They can either be downloaded or read directly online. Any literature for which U.S. copyright has expired can be found here.
NewsELA is an online resource of nonfiction articles for teachers to use with their students. Each article comes with premade questions and writing prompts. Articles are for all grade levels and are tagged with content standards to help teachers align lessons to their curriculum. While articles and the prompts/questions are the greatest benefit, they also have videos and other resources. The free version of Newsela allows teachers to see classroom level data relating to learning standards. The paid version allows teachers to see statistics for individual students such as individual student quiz scores, and even time spent on each article. Newsela provides differentiation so all students across five reading levels have access to the curriculum.
Open Textbook Library https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks
This is a repository of openly licensed, free, peer-reviewed, academic textbooks.
StoryMaking Apps
StoryJumper is a website that offers free software for teachers and students to create their own books. This website is a collection of tools allowing students to create unique and individualized story books. Teachers design lessons allowing their students whatever level of freedom to use the website’s features that they wish.
A fantastic resource that allows students and teachers to create their own books. Sharing options include: publishing online, creating a downloadable book, or to export as an eBook.. Pricing is $60 per year for 180 books or $120 per year for 1,000 books. Book creator is available at a discount for school districts. iPad pricing for the first 40 books. The iPad app is $4.99
wattpad.com is a digital storytelling platform for facilitating creative writing and potentially publishing and producing student writing in other mediums. It is best used for mature high school students and requires supervision from the teacher due to the potential for encountering inappropriate content and negative comments from users. The site is inappropriate for middle school students and younger.
Selecting Instructional Materials & Readability Apps
Lexile measures started as a tool for assisting teachers when they are selecting texts for their students, based on their presumed reading levels. They have grown to be much more than that.
The Lexile Analyzer measures the complexity of a text by sorting through characteristics like sentence length and word frequency. Generally, longer sentences and words of lower frequency lead to higher Lexile measures; shorter sentences and words of higher frequency lead to lower Lexile measures.
benchmarkeducation.com/reading-level-conversion-chart.html is a simple chart that helps teachers interpret reading levels information accross systems
https://www.webfx.com/tools/read-able/
This free readability test tool provides a quick way to check the readability of your writing. The site also has brief descriptions of the various readability indicators in use today, including: the Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease tool, the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level tool, the Gunning Fog Score tool, the Coleman Liau Index, the Automated Readability Index (ARI) and the SMOG Index.
Readworks.org allows teachers to search by grade or by lexile for reading passages that match their students’ interests and abilities. ReadWorks.org is free. Teachers can access the reading passages, articles and paired texts. The passages are accompanied by different types of questions and vocabulary activities. Searches can also be done by genre, topic, or reading and strategy. In addition, the site offers a digital classroom where students can highlight, annotate texts. Teachers can access progress reports & use an automatic grading feature.
Rewordify is a web-based program that helps teachers to identify the reading level of a particular text, so they can select curriculum materials appropriately, but it also provides students and teachers with the support they need to extract meaning from difficult texts.
Grammar & Style Websites & Apps
This is the premier Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University provides various resources and instructional material for students and teachers with a focus on writing, writing processes, grammar and formatting.
Grammar Girl www.youtube.com/channel/UC9nKWrOxInft2dNfgSFFvsA
This is the youtube channel for Grammar Girl, a podcast hosted by Mignon Fogarty who shares her weekly video tips about English, grammar, and writing.
Grammarly.com Compose clear, mistake-free writing that makes the right impression with Grammarly’s writing assistant.
This site houses grammar, pronunciation, reading and listening lessons with embedded assessments.
This site houses grammar, pronunciation, reading and listening lessons with embedded assessments.
TEACHING COMPOSITION RESOURCES
www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource_topic/teaching_writing
The National Writing Project website warehouses various resources for teaching writing, including:writing topics, lessons on teaching audience, digital writing tips, information on teaching for equity, teaching ELLs, teaching writing about literary genres, academic writing, writing in various genres, styles and forms and teaching grammar and usage. This site also has resources on responding to writing, rhetoric and style, writing across the curriculum, writing about literature, writing centers, writing in the community, writing processes, Collaborative Writing, Prewriting, Revision and Publishing
Writing Prompts (https://archive.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource_topic/writing_prompts)
This corner of the NWP website has ideas for writing prompts.
Research on Teaching Writing https://archive.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource_topic/research_teaching_writing
This part of the NWP website has resources about the research on teaching composition.
TEACHING LITERATURE
This is a library of 1391 Literature Guides, 354 Poetry Guides and 136 Literary Devices and Terms. The site also contains Shakespeare Translations of every Shakespeare play. The call it “SkakesClear.”
Poets.org offers free poetry lesson plans, poems for adolescents, a calendar of teaching resources for the school year, a glossary of poetry terms, and many excellent poems. Their lesson plans are aligned with the Common Core and developed to help students develop their skills of perception and imagination.
This site contains the complete works of William Shakespeare.
Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom https://roundme.com/embed/Bqnj2GvyxPJQISHK94bm
This site provides a virtual field trip to Amherst, MA, to Dickinson’s Homestead where she wrote poetry between 1858 to 1865. The Emily Dickinson Museum’s Education resources page is a powerful place to explore potential curriculum ideas and information. https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/education/
OTHER ELA RESOURCES
ListenwiseELA is a bank of lessons based on podcasts developed for ELA teachers that include content based on current events and listening comprehension quizzes. Assessment reports can be generated by listening skills (inference, main idea, etc.) Audio files can be shared to Google Classroom. Lexile audio is measured on every podcast. Lessons are Standards-aligned and easily differentiated. And, “close” listening with language practice and tiered vocabulary resources are included. This platform is compatible with Schoology and Canvas.
This is a non-profit website that is an educational website that gamifies learning vocabulary. For every question that is answered correctly, 10 grains of rice are sent to a country that is in need of food aid. The United Nations is responsible for determining who needs the rice most. They currently have aid in 82 countries throughout the world. Freerice is run by the United Nations World Food Programme. The main goals of this site are to offer free education to everyone and to end world hunger. There currently is no app available, only the website. Sponsors who advertise on the site are the corporations that pay for the rice. The program buys the rice locally so that they are supporting the local economies on those developing nations.
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