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Reading & Writing

Visit these links to help you in planning for your ELA projects, research, and lessons

Achieve the Core: Writing practice for the CCSS practice with complex texts, text-dependent questions, vocabulary, writing assessments, and assessment questions. Grades K-12.
American Rhetoric: Thousands of speeches from history, politics, movies, literary figures, religion, sports, and pop-culture. Most are available with both the text and the Mp3, many with the video as well. These make great primary sources when showing how great writers and speakers present their words. It even has links to the most popular magazines and newspapers of today!

Common Lit: High-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 3-12 with resources that are flexible, research-based, aligned to CCSS, and created by teachers.

Crash Course: Through a YouTube channel, these quick-and-dirty lessons can help students get an overview of many popular works in literature. These would be a great to incorporate in a flipped classroom!

Creative Book Builder: This app allows students to create books in epub format (different from PDF in that it preserves any media built in to each document), which can then be exported to iBooks and shared with others. It has a publishing tool for project-based learning or a summative assessment at the end of a unit. Students can embed images, audio files, video files, and write text that aligns with every level of the revised Bloom's Taxonomy.

Educational Technology Clearinghouse: Included here are videos and interactive lessons on many topics. Look in the left column to navigate!

Guide to Grammar & Writing: Lots of great stuff from grammar to structure to rhetoric. Worth looking at!
INK - Non-Fiction Minute: Choose any Non-fiction Minute author and invite him or her to your school for an hour of Q&A through Zoom (like Skype). Authors are booked through the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration.  Titles are listed with links to the descriptions of their programs.
INK - Non-Fiction Minute: Compelling short self-contained original 400-word essays by top nonfiction children's book authors on a variety of subjects. With illuminating visuals and accompanying audio read by the author. Articles also include MLA citation. Index of topics is in right-margin. Check out the FOR TEACHERS tab for lesson plan ideas on how to incorporate into your curriculum. See articles specific to ELA here.

Khan Academy: Interactive lessons and video tutorials on grammar, syntax, usage, and style.

Learn Out Loud: This audio and video directory has over 5,000 titles  on many subjects, many of which are classic literature titles, dramas, poetry, world classics, short stories, author readings, and more that are read aloud to students. Amazing free resource!!!

Lit 2 Go: A free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 format. Each passage can be dowloaded as a PDF and printed for read-along.

Literacy Shed, The: A collection of videos meant to inspire writing.
Mixed Up Files of Middle Grade Authors: This site's mission is to offer teachers, librarians, parents, kids, writers, and anyone with a passion for children’s literature: booklists organized by unique categories, author interviews, market news, and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of children’s books from writing to publishing and promoting. It also includes writing tips from published authors, and links to author websites with author resources, and sneak peeks into upcoming novels.

NewsELA: Currently a free service, NewsELA contains articles for every subject written from 4th grade to college level. Students can register and be given reading at their own lexile. Lesson plans are also available for teachers to use with the text.

Text Complexity: Use the resources in the box below to assist you in determining text complexity for your articles or books.
Tribune: Smithsonian has created a website of high-interest articles, and each article is provided at multiple levels. This could be beneficial for meeting the needs of all reading levels within your class. It has Lexile leveled current events, lesson plans, quizzes, and assessments.

WatchKnowLearn.org: Videos on many ELA topics can be useful for flipped classrooms or for offering support for students who need extra help!

WeNeedDiverseBooks: Need to find books that deal with topics, characters or authors of diversity? This resource can help direct you with where to get those materials.

Content-Specific Tech tutorials:

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This box is for technology tutorials that are content specific to ELA. If you know of any others to add, please let me know.

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Probable Passage Using Padlet. Video File. 5:06. Created by D. Scott.

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Text Complexity

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There is not one specific website that can determine text complexity.  When determining the complexity of a text three areas should be considered: qualitative, quantitative, and reader and task.  Attached documents to support the consideration of qualitative and reader & task.  Teachers can go to the lexile website to determine lexile levels

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Text Complexity Analysis: (click here for a template)

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Online Support:

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If you know of any other trustworthy sources that could be included in this collection, please contact me so I can add them!

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