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Resources for English Language Arts Teachers--All sites open to a new browser window.

Elementary | Middle | Secondary | SOL | Multicultural | ESL/EFL | Gateway Sites | General | VATE Teaching Ideas | NCTE Policy Briefs

English Resources (Elementary)

International Kids Space: This site offers an elementary school age writing game in which children can create their own play by selecting characters, assigning lines, and watching their creations come to life through animation.

Giggle Poetry: This site allows young readers and writers to have fun with poetry, to rate children’s poems, to play poetry games, and to read poems about school.

Starfall.com: This site focuses on beginning sounds and reading skills, which help children learn their sounds and increase their spelling abilities. The stories are fun and entertaining.

Word Central: Word Central is the place on the Web where kids can learn how much fun words can be! This site was developed with input from teachers around the country using a language arts curriculum framework.

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English Resources (Middle)

ALAN (Assembly on LIterature for Adolescents of NCTE): This site contains all types of news and notes on Young Adult Literature and how to get students--especially secondary students to read and actually enjoy reading!

Interactive Reading: Interactive Reading (Grades 4-8), a teacher training module for reading comprehension instruction, combines research-based strategies, many of which are used by Virginia teachers, into a framework for teachers and students to use regularly with a variety of texts.

Reading Gamebook Magazine: Mark Dawson realized that the resources for reading were dry and ineffective for his students, so he decided to take a unique approach. He applied his love for mathematics, crossword puzzles and logic games to the teaching of reading and has created his own arsenal of puzzling worksheets that he has used in the classroom.

Wordsalive: Wordsalive (Grades 5-9), a vocabulary acquisition model, combines researched-based strategies, many of which are utilized by Virginia teachers, into a student-friendly graphic organizer.

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English Resources (High-College)

American Studies and the University of Virginia: A beautiful, well organized site with hypertexts, cultural maps, and links to outside resources.

Bartleby.com: This site provides unlimited access to books and information free of charge.

Guide to Grammar and Writing: Sentence Level, Paragraph Level, and Essay Level lessons, samples (in .pdf format) for business letters, memos, application letters, thank-you letters, resumes, meeting minutes and agendas, and the research paper, PowerPoint presentations to download.

Online Poetry Classroom: This site allows readers to locate other sites about poets and poems. The site includes features, such as Find a Poet, Find a Poem, A Poetry Timeline, A National Poetry Map, and Teacher Resources.

Purdue University's Online Writing Lab: This site includes good advice and direction on rewriting and good research activities.

SAT Preparation: There are over 3,000 multiple choice questions divided into 21 groups. There is also a database browser to review and print the questions and the correct answers.

Student Plagiarism in an Online World: The proliferation of web pages and electronic publications makes plagiarism easier to accomplish and harder to recognize. Here are some tools to help you expose cybercheaters. By Julie J.C.H. Ryan

Teaching Tolerance: Tolerance.org is a principal online destination for people interested in dismantling bigotry and creating, in hate's stead, communities that value diversity.

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Standards of Learning Resources

Domain Scoring: An outline of the domain scoring guide used to evaluate the SOL writing test.

English Enhanced Scope and Sequence: These materials are intended as examples of how the knowledge and skills might be presented to students in a sequence of lessons that has been aligned with the Standards of Learning.

NCS Mentor for Virginia: This is a training tool designed to help Virginia’s teachers prepare students for the English Standards of Learning Direct Writing Assessment. Developed by the Virginia Department of Education and Pearson Educational Measurement, this program provides practice-scoring opportunities with sets of papers written by Virginia students.

Virginia SOL and General Study Activities: Online tests created by Terri Maloney, Poquoson Elementary School, using the 2002 VDOE Released Items.

VDOE Standards of Learning Resources: Powerpoint Presentation of SOL Resources on the VDOE site.

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Multicultural Sites

Classic African American Literature: Links to electronic texts provided by Edchange.org

Contemporary U.S. Literature-Multicultural Perspectives: This journal introduces a global audience to the continuously evolving multicultural literature in our day.

Native American Authors: Presented by the Internet Public Library

Voices of the Shuttle-Minority Literature: This is very extensive meta-index of humanities Internet resources, including pages for English literature and literatures other than English.

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ESL/EFL Sites

ACT-ESL: A project for helping teachers in Chesterfield County schools with the teaching of LEP students.

Activities for ESL Students: This project of The Internet TESL Journal (iteslj.org) has thousands of contributions by many teachers.

ESL Monkeys: Free English-as-a-second-language teaching materials and learning resources.

Sounds of English: Designed for learners of English and their teachers.

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English/Language Arts Gateway Sites

EDSitement: EDSITEment offers a information for teachers, students, and parents searching for high-quality material on the Internet in the subject areas of literature and language arts, foreign languages, art and culture, and history and social studies.

ReadWriteThink: ReadWriteThink provides educators and students with access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction through free, Internet-based content.

Treasure Chest of Web Resources: A web site managed by Henrico County English department, featuring links to SOL implementation activities, English resources, and lesson plans developed by Henrico County (6-12) English teachers.

Web English Teacher: At Web English Teacher educators can take advantage of online technology to share ideas and to benefit from the work of others.

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General Resources

Wish You Well Foundation: Supporting family literacy in the United States by fostering and promoting the development and expansion of new and existing literacy and educational programs. (David Baldacci's project)

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Great Teaching Ideas Archive (PDF)

VATE Lesson Plan for The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois (PDF)
VATE Lesson Plan for The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois (Word)

Read-Around-Groups: A Structured Cooperative Learning Activity that Really Works!

Creating Characters

Making 1984 Relevant in 2004

Literary Analysis as Prewriting

Poetry Island

Writing about the Novel Nothing to Fear

Teaching Thinking with Writing (and Vice Versa)

Embedded Grammar Instruction

Teaching Poetry Writing

How to Survive Fifth Grade (External link)

Balanced Literacy- “Lovin’ It”

An Open Letter to the Student by Robert H. Rempe

Write Night: An Evening Writing Program for Students and Parents by Carrie Perry

Life-Lit-Links

Power Writing Through Poetry

Writing Creatively Through the SOL’s by Fara Wiles

A Different Approach for Teaching Research

Sentence Surgery by Lisa Zeff

Historical Fiction Research Project

Historical Book Report

Extended Metaphor

Teaching Plot Structures Through Short Stories

Newspaper Highlighting Strengthens Textual Awareness

Lesson Plan: Casey at the Bat
Powerpoint: Casey at the Bat

Puzzle It Out: Clues for Active Reading

Using Travel Brochures to Enrich Students’ Lives (and Their Reading and Writing)

NCTE Policy Briefs

21st-Century Literacies: A NCTE Policy Research Brief

Adolescent Literacy: A NCTE Policy Research Brief

English Language Learners: A NCTE Policy Research Brief


Credit

The links on this page were selected and anotated by Bill Boyle, Jennifer Cummings, Beverly Debreczeni, Tammy Held, Shelley Herring, Maureen Houser, Armetris Howard, Linda MacCleave, Kyan Mulligan, Roark Mulligan, Leslie Pagans, Candy Scherberger, Catherine Sershen, and Ashlie Walker.

 

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